Manual Standby and Archlogs application

Question

Hi There,
I need to set up a manual standby database for one of our production databases. We are using oracle 11g (11.1.0.7) 64x STANDARD EDITION on Windows 2008 server 64x.
I shutdown the database, copied the data files and redo logs to a new server (same directories structure to the production database); I created a standby controlfile and a pfile and copied both across to the new host.
I created the oracle windows service on the new machine and started the database as follows:
C:\Users\oracle>
C:\Users\oracle>SQLPLUS "/AS SYSDBA"
SQL*Plus: Release 11.1.0.7.0 - Production on Tue Apr 13 15:04:53 2010
Copyright (c) 1982, 2008, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Connected to an idle instance.
SQL> STARTUP PFILE='C:\oracle\product\11.1.0.7\database\INITSTDBT.ORA' NOMOUNT;
ORA-32006: STANDBY_ARCHIVE_DEST initialization parameter has been deprecated
ORACLE instance started.
Total System Global Area  542814208 bytes
Fixed Size                  2131248 bytes
Variable Size             419433168 bytes
Database Buffers          117440512 bytes
Redo Buffers                3809280 bytes
SQL>
SQL>
SQL> SELECT STATUS FROM V$INSTANCE;
STATUS
STARTED
SQL> alter database mount standby database;
Database altered.The production database has forced logging enabled in it so that we can capture all the DDL statemtents.
We created a dummy schema, a dummy table (with few rows); issued a commit, and then switched the logs few times to create the necessary archive logs. We then manually moved the archive logs to the new standby host, and put them under the appropriate directory (D:\oracle\flash_recovery_area\STDBT\ARCHIVELOG\2010_04_13).
Now we tried to recover the database by applying the new shipped logs:
SQL> recover standby database
ORA-00279: change 606666 generated at 04/13/2010 14:37:19 needed for thread 1
ORA-00289: suggestion :
D:\ORACLE\FLASH_RECOVERY_AREA\STDBT\ARCHIVELOG\2010_04_13\O1_MF_1_46_%U_.ARC
ORA-00280: change 606666 for thread 1 is in sequence #46
Specify log: {<RET>=suggested | filename | AUTO | CANCEL}
ORA-00308: cannot open archived log
'D:\ORACLE\FLASH_RECOVERY_AREA\STDBT\ARCHIVELOG\2010_04_13\O1_MF_1_46_%U_.ARC'
ORA-27041: unable to open file
OSD-04002: unable to open file
O/S-Error: (OS 2) The system cannot find the file specified.
ORA-01547: warning: RECOVER succeeded but OPEN RESETLOGS would get error below
ORA-01152: file 1 was not restored from a sufficiently old backup
ORA-01110: data file 1: 'D:\ORACLE\ORADATA\STDBT\SYSTEM01.DBF'So we thought we'll try the recovery again by manually putting the filename in:
SQL> recover standby database
ORA-00279: change 606666 generated at 04/13/2010 14:37:19 needed for thread 1
ORA-00289: suggestion :
D:\ORACLE\FLASH_RECOVERY_AREA\STDBT\ARCHIVELOG\2010_04_13\O1_MF_1_46_%U_.ARC
ORA-00280: change 606666 for thread 1 is in sequence #46
Specify log: {<RET>=suggested | filename | AUTO | CANCEL}
D:\oracle\flash_recovery_area\STDBT\ARCHIVELOG\2010_04_13\O1_MF_1_46_5W9W3LT3_.ARC
ORA-00279: change 608376 generated at 04/13/2010 15:30:10 needed for thread 1
ORA-00289: suggestion :
D:\ORACLE\FLASH_RECOVERY_AREA\STDBT\ARCHIVELOG\2010_04_13\O1_MF_1_47_%U_.ARC
ORA-00280: change 608376 for thread 1 is in sequence #47
ORA-00278: log file
'D:\oracle\flash_recovery_area\STDBT\ARCHIVELOG\2010_04_13\O1_MF_1_46_5W9W3LT3_.
ARC' no longer needed for this recovery
Specify log: {<RET>=suggested | filename | AUTO | CANCEL}
D:\oracle\flash_recovery_area\STDBT\ARCHIVELOG\2010_04_13\O1_MF_1_47_5W9W7P6D_.ARC
ORA-00279: change 608426 generated at 04/13/2010 15:32:20 needed for thread 1
ORA-00289: suggestion :
D:\ORACLE\FLASH_RECOVERY_AREA\STDBT\ARCHIVELOG\2010_04_13\O1_MF_1_48_%U_.ARC
ORA-00280: change 608426 for thread 1 is in sequence #48
ORA-00278: log file
'D:\oracle\flash_recovery_area\STDBT\ARCHIVELOG\2010_04_13\O1_MF_1_47_5W9W7P6D_.
ARC' no longer needed for this recovery
Specify log: {<RET>=suggested | filename | AUTO | CANCEL}
CANCEL
Media recovery cancelled.So, the issue here is that even though the archive logs did exist in the correct directory, when we hit enter to accept the default, oracle didn't find the logs and it was looking for a file with the format "O1_MF_1_46_%U_.ARC" instead of "O1_MF_1_46_5W9W3LT3_.ARC" and so the recovery failed.. How can we fix this so that oracle will detect the correct archlog name so that when we automate the applying of the logs it will work (and we don't have to do enter them manually one by one)?
SQL> ALTER DATABASE ACTIVATE STANDBY DATABASE;
Database altered.
SQL> select status from v$instance;
STATUS
MOUNTED
SQL>
SQL>
SQL>
SQL> alter database open read only;
alter database open read only
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-16433: The database has not been opened in read-write modeAnother question, once we activated the standby database, we tried to open it but it failed with above error; do we have to shut it down 1st and then do a normal STARTUP command? or do we have to open it with resetlogs??
If someone can shed some light here that will be great.
Thanks
Edited by: rsar001 on Apr 13, 2010 4:27 PM

Answer 1

SQL> show parameter log_archive_dest
NAME                                 TYPE        VALUE
log_archive_dest                     string
log_archive_dest_1                   string
log_archive_dest_10                  string
log_archive_dest_2                   string
log_archive_dest_3                   string
log_archive_dest_4                   string
log_archive_dest_5                   string
log_archive_dest_6                   string
log_archive_dest_7                   string
log_archive_dest_8                   string
log_archive_dest_9                   string
log_archive_dest_state_1             string      enable
log_archive_dest_state_10            string      enable
log_archive_dest_state_2             string      enable
log_archive_dest_state_3             string      enable
log_archive_dest_state_4             string      enable
log_archive_dest_state_5             string      enable
log_archive_dest_state_6             string      enable
log_archive_dest_state_7             string      enable
log_archive_dest_state_8             string      enable
log_archive_dest_state_9             string      enable
SQL> show parameter recover
NAME                                 TYPE        VALUE
db_recovery_file_dest                string      D:\oracle\flash_recovery_area
db_recovery_file_dest_size           big integer 2G
recovery_parallelism                 integer     0
SQL>