ORA-01578: Miracle healing of corrupted datablock?

Hi all,

we encountered a strange behaviour or miracle with Oracle 8.1.7 under AIX 5.2 We got an corrupted datafile (this was not the miracle):

ORA-01578: ORACLE data block corrupted (file # 3, block # 89918)

We examined the datafile with db verify (dbv ) and got the result that everything is ok. Why?
We couldn't retrieve one table completely which allocates the corrupt block.
There were 67 records we couldn't retrieve. The other 1.8 million records we rescued into a new table and renamed the new and the original table.
We didn't drop the original table with the bad block because we wanted to prove a behaviour which we encountered already in the past with an other Oracle 8.1.7 instance.

And yes ... the next day, everything was fine (this was the miracle).

The corrupted block was ok. All records of the original table could be retrieved.

In the night there is only a backup. The database files are set into begin back mode and later into end backup. We also tried this to fix the corrupted file. As well as restarting the database. But this had no effect.

Is there anybody out there who can explain this miracle healing?

I wish you all a happy 2006 full of miracles! Carsten Jacobs Received on Fri Dec 30 2005 - 05:21:12 CST