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Symptoms
Changes
Cause
Solution
APPLIES TO:
SYMPTOMS
This is not RAC specific and could happen in Single Instances as well
if Flashback logs required are not available, as for example FLB logs was deleted using OS commands.
One of the RAC Instances does not come up, its looking for a Flash back log which has been accidently deleted.
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Oracle is trying to turn on flashback database on startup automatically and failing with ORA-38760 as flashback log is
missing.
CHANGES
CAUSE
When Current flashback log is deleted then database open will fail with following error:
SOLUTION
There are 2 possible solutions when a flashback log file was deleted manually:
The Alert log will have the following entries when you turn off flashback:
(2) In cases where "Guaranteed Restore Point" is defined, RVWR will still try to write to flashback log even
though you have disable it and it will fail again with same error:
Check if flashback database is disable or not. When checked the flashback status after disabling flashback, it shows
'RESTORE POINT ONLY' instead of 'NO'.
FLASHBACK_ON
------------------
RESTORE POINT ONLY
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YES - Flashback is on
NO - Flashback is off
RESTORE POINT ONLY - Flashback is on but one can only flashback to guaranteed restore points
Find out the name of Guaranteed Restore Point and delete so that database would not try to write to flashback log on
startup:
2.1) Check the name from v$restore_point view but that would also fail with same error:
Here we are not able to query v$restore _point to find out the name.
2.2) Search for restore point name in alert log. In this case customer was purging alert log every year starting so could not
find name for the Restore Point.
***************************************************************************
RESTORE POINT RECORDS
***************************************************************************
(size = 212, compat size = 212, section max = 2048, section in-use = 1,
last-recid= 1, old-recno = 0, last-recno = 0)
(extent = 1, blkno = 240, numrecs = 2048)
RESTORE POINT #1:
restore point name: STANDBY_FLASHBACK_TESTING guarantee flag: 1 incarnation: 2next record
0 <<<< Name of restore point
restore point scn: 0x0000.fbff3d87 12/07/2012 02:16:32
Database Altered
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Note: This error may also occur if the FRA is full and thus a flashback log cannot be created. Check
V$flash_recovery_area_usage and/or V$recovery_file_dest regarding space availability in FRA.
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