RMAN 8.0.4 Bug

I am including an email I received internally and thought might be of some interest to the general user group.

Apparently we have hit this bug with the RMAN backups where a session serial# increments (to extremely large values) as the cumulative number of logons to an 804 database increases. When the database is bounced, the serial# resets. So, we get a good Cold backup on Sunday (and the serial number is reset when the DB goes down); then we get a couple of good Hot BU's (Mon/Tue). But then, by Wednesday, the serial# has reached a value too large for RMAN to handle, and any subsequent Hot BU's will fail, unti l the Sunday Cold BU - and the process cycles again.

 X has outlined 3 fixes (below), which we'll need to discuss with you. A quick fix would be to bounce a DB sometime on Wednesday and Friday to clear out the serial#; this is obviously not a long term solution.This bug only affects RMAN backups - not normal Oracle 804 operations (we hope).

Subject: 8.0.4 RMAN BUG

Dave,

Here's the message I got from Oracle Tech support regarding the database hot backup problem. Bug 666637 in 8.0.4 causes the hot backup to fail when the session serial# reaches a large value which cannot be stored. This threshold is reached sometime during the middle of the week.

Oracle suggests 3 options:

1. Patch 8.0.4.3
2. Upgrade to 8.0.5.1
3. Shutdown and restart the database to reset serial#

We are going for option 1. I am planning to apply the patch on a test database. In the meanwhile, in order to get the hot backups to work o we need to schedule downtime of about 5-10 min to shutdown and restart the database.

Any suggestions, questions are welcome.

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own Received on Tue Feb 16 1999 - 17:01:55 CST