Re: it happened, lost database and recovery catalog. starting distaster recovery research

On May 14, 7:57 am, Ben <balve..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 10.2.0.2 EE, aix5L
>
> had a storm this weekend and power went out to the disk cabinet on our
> development machine. I was just informed by our sys admin that we
> might be having to recover from disk to get everything back.
>
> Luckily it is just our development machine but we do have critical
> data in that database. The recovery catalog was located on the same
> machine and filesystem. Now I'm setting forth with the research on how
> to get it back. I have documentation of control file backups, the
> dbid, and the last hot backup of the database. I don't have a backup
> for the recovery catalog that we were using. Correct me if I'm wrong,
> but I guess I'll be recovering the control file(s) then recovering the
> database from those instead of the catalog. I've practiced recovery in
> the past but never without the recovery catalog.
>
> Wish me luck. Any pointers?

The first thing is to backup anything you can, so you don't shoot yourself in the foot by screwing things up trying to recover.

I'm not real sure what you mean by recover from disk, but in general, if you can use the control file that Oracle was using during the crash, you will do better than with one you've recovered. The manuals and metalink have examples covering many common situations. You may need to tell rman where things are, one way or another. If you use a recovered catalog, you may need to use the recover using backup controlfile syntax to tell Oracle to apply more recent archived logs (see PITR examples).

Hopefully you've learned some lessons about placement and backup of your catalog, as well as keeping practiced in recovery.

jg

--
@home.com is bogus.
$230M worth of spam: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20080514/D90L6QC00.html