Re: Oracle Data Corruption error message

In article <CyA8r2.6HA_at_skopen.dseg.ti.com>, joel_at_skopen.dseg.ti.com (Joel Quejada) writes:
|>
|>One of my users is getting the following Oracle data corruption
|>message:
|>
|>ERROR:
|>ORA-01578: ORACLE data block corrupted (file # 24, block # 2)
|>ORA-00600:
|> internal error code, arguments: [3339], [0], [1610612738], [], [], []
|>
|>
|>This sounds like some kind of a disk media surface defect. However,
|>I don't see any messages being reported by the OS. We are planning on
|>doing a complete dump, reformat, and restore of this disk. Is this
|>the only way to solve this problem?
|>

We had a regular occurrance of this problem in a 7.0.15 database on VMS. It turned out to be a bug (#235912) which would occurr under the following circumstance: if the last column of a table is of type LONG, and you set it to NULL, the block can become corrupt. I beleive this bug exists on other operating system too. It's fixed in 7.1.3, but patches are available for earlier versions.

The immediate fix in our case was to just drop the corrupted table, and restore from the last export.

Bottom line is: Call Oracle support - you may not need to mess with your file system!