Re: LOST DataBase Password

Knowing the O/S would really save everyone some time.

Under UNIX, knowing the root password and using the su command to become the UNIX operating system "Oracle owner" can get you through this. And the first thing you ought to do is to change the "oracle" (operating system) password to something you know, and also make sure that /etc/group has an entry in it for the dba group. Also, ensure that the UNIX user "oracle" is not listed in the root group.

This is all assuming about 22 things about how you installed Oracle, what release, on what operating system, how you are accessing it, (direct from the O/S on the SYSCON, as a terminal, as a client workstation, etc etc).

If your Oracle software, and the instance you are having problems with, were both installed, say, owned as the "oracle" user, and you are running some sort of UNIX, firstly do a

ps -fu oracle | more

assuming "oracle" is that owning/master user; otherwise substitute the appropriate username.

Ideally that should be a very short list as a result. If you see anything like DBWR, LGWR, SMON, PMON come back as a result, you have to ensure a safe shutdown. As the Oracle owner, use svrmgrl and issue a shutdown immediate.

You should have the system administrator do a complete filedump of the system while Oracle is down, before anything further.

Getting to the matter of 'getting access to your database files', the purpose of Oracle or any decent relational database management system is to prevent that very thing. Oracle provides a secure interface between the raw data and people that want to play with it, including user names, roles, abstractions such as tables, rows, and columns, and a rich functionality as well.

If you mean you forgot the passwords for sys and system; first, the defaults are in the books (and should be changed about 1 minute after an Oracle instance is built); as the Oracle owner (meaning owner of the software and the datafiles and processes) you can reset them if necessary with the ALTER USER command.

As the literal datafiles (not tables, tablespaces, etc) as one would see in doing a UNIX ls command, only the Oracle owner should have read and write access to them, and all other permissions should be ---.

In any case there are few good reasons for anyone to be accessing Oracle datafiles directly, apart from doing cold dumps for backups with the DBMS shut down. There are a lot of bad or non-reasons. So do you mean tables?

If you are using raw partitions (I hope not), make sure only root has access to 0, and generally a few other addresses, for each drive.

If you are using NT, most of all this would be of little help to you, for which I apologize.

RSH. "kashveti" <kashveti_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:176491e2.0204301136.3917ac47_at_posting.google.com...
> i have setup oracle server 9, designed a database, but lost my
> password to it. Now i can't get an access to my database files. does
> anybody knows how to change password manualy or maybe it is recorded
> in some .log files? HELP PLEASE
Received on Thu May 02 2002 - 01:16:33 CDT