Re: bizarre Oracle problem

Comments embedded.
Vsevolod Afanassiev wrote:
> We have observed bizzare Oracle problem: when reading init.ora on
> startup Oracle would ignore all but first value for multi-valued
> parameters like CONTROL_FILES and ROLLBACK_SEGMENTS. This is reflected
> in alert.log.
>
> For example, init.ora says:
> rollback_segments = (rb01, rb02, rb03)
> but alert.log shows
>
> rollback_segments = rb01
>
> so this segment is brought online while RB02 and RB03 remain offline.
> There is nothing wrong with RB02 and RB03 and they could
> be brought online manually.
>
> Similar thing happened with control files: init.ora says
>
> control_files = (/u01/oracle/PROD/control01.ctl,
> /u02/oracle/PROD/control02.ctl,
> /u03/oracle/PROD/control03.ctl)
>
> But alert.log shows
>
> control_files = /u01/oracle/PROD/control01.ctl
>

Possibly your entry in the init.ora file is not correctly formatted; I have this in my file and it works flawlessly:

control_files=("/oraunix/oradata/dev9/control01.ctl",
               "/oraunix/oradata/dev9/control02.ctl",
               "/oraunix/oradata/dev9/control03.ctl")

> So the database starts but runs with only one control file.
> There are no errors in alert.log on startup.
>
> This is 8.1.7.4.0 on HP-UX 11.0
>
> Have anyone seen something similar?

No, but I've always written such entries in my init.ora files (when I've needed them) in the manner I posted above. It cannot harm you to change the format in your assignment values, so that is what I would be doing, editing my init.ora to see if it was actually user error.

As I'm on 9.2.0.6 and using automatic UNDO management I have no rollback segment entry to provide.

David Fitzjarrell Received on Fri Oct 07 2005 - 10:12:11 CDT