Re: RMAN restore 11.2.0.2 not honoring symbolic link

From: Joseph210 <lee210_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2011 08:52:06 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <85c7f78c-9b1d-4ab6-99ee-33b382d9a44b_at_g27g2000pre.googlegroups.com>



On Nov 6, 4:40 pm, John Hurley <hurleyjo..._at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> Joseph:
>
> > When we upgraded our database from 11.2.0.1 to 11.2.0.2, we have
> > discoverd that Oracle is not honoring symbolic links--the symbolic
> > links get overwritten directly when there is a media failure,
> > datafiles missing or deleted.
>
> I guess I forgot to say on my original reply that my testing of rman
> recoveries including some symbolic links to ASM disks also has worked
> just fine under 11.2.0.2.x before moving up to 11.2.0.3.0 ...
>
> More details please.

We are hp-ux itanium 11.31 OS with Oracle 11.2.0.2. My college tested this on linux/aix boxes as well.

we are not using ASM disks, just file system. I have tested some basic senarios when Oracle honors symbolic links or not:
as long as there are existing oracle datafiles in destination dir, it does honor symbolic links (you can copy almost any Oracle datafile to all the other datafiles).
But if we deleted the datafiles in destination dir, rman cannot restore them with ORA-01116: error in opening database file 1 ORA-01110: data file 1: '/oracle/data/jl11g202/jl11g202/system01.dbf' ORA-27041: unable to open file
HPUX-ia64 Error: 2: No such file or directory.

When we touch the destination file with 0 bytes, rman restores but overwrite the symbolic link itself instead of following/honorning the symbolic link (this is only 11.2.0.2 behavior -- when you create a datafile, it did not honor symbolic link, either. Oracle provided a fix, so it is ok now; but rman restore have this issue still).

So my workaround is to copy any Oracle datafile to the missing one(s), then rman restore honors the symbolic links (except controlfile -- its symbolic links are overwritten).

Thanks for sharing your info -- it is good to know this seems to be resoved with 11.2.0.3 (?) or ASM environment.

Joseph Received on Mon Nov 07 2011 - 10:52:06 CST

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