URGENT : database down at 01-APR-96 10:32:00

Dear All,

This morning I found I could not start one of our databases :

• ora-01116 error in opening datafile

Indeed, I had a look and found that the file was missing.

I asked one of my colleagues if he had seen it anywhere, but he had been busily purging his old EMAILs and so hadn't noticed it.

Anyway , as luck would have it, he told me that he had a spare data file on one of his databases, and that I could have it, on condition that if he ever needed it in future I would return it.

Better than nothing I thought, so I put the file onto my machine in the correct directory with the correct name.

Still the database refused to start :

• ora-01159 - file is not from same database - wrong database id

So edited the file and changed the bit where Oracle records the ID.

Next I got :

• ora-01113 - file needs media recovery.

I complained to my colleague, after all it was a little bit unfair of him to give me a file that needed recovery.
But after discussion with him, we realised that some outstanding transactions existed is his database. Since it had taken ages to copy the data file , we decided to copy his log files + plus a clever bit of SQL to copy the contents of his rollback segments into the ones in my database.

It still wouldn't do 'startup normal',
so we finally resorted to to 'startup abort'. Obviously, we got the thing up, but some previously good programs are now giving errors like they can't find the tables or indexes (is this a bug?).

Anyway, back to work ; I am still busily running sql updates against the data dictionary to try and fix some of the errors.

Has anyone else had any similar experiences (today) ?

Kevin

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