MaxDb hung at starting database stage

Question

Hi all,
We have NW2004s and Maxdb on linux _86 system.
SP update terminated due to space requirement for db. I restored the db from back up and it went into restart mode. took a long time so cancelled it and tried starting the db using "startdb", but it gets hung at
<b>Trying to start database ...
Log file: /home/bw7adm/startdb.log</b>
the error in startdb.log is
Starting Database Instance...
OK
Opening Database...
ERR
-24988,ERR_SQL: SQL error
-104,DBM command impossible at this time
20013,Admin command cannot enter critical state 'Redo'
6,Restart, Errorcode 6561 "dbm_command_not_possible"
Fri Oct 19 19:41:06 CEST 2007
Connect to the database to verify the database is now open
dbmcli check finished with return code: 0
Can anyone help me with this?
Thanks guys...
Regards
Hari

Answer 1

Hi Hari,
for a detailed analysis this is not enough information, but I <b>guess</b> that this is what happened:
you restored the database from backup (for whatever reason... neither a DATA AREA FULL nor a LOG FULL would ever require a restore!) but you left the LOG AREA as it was.
when the database starts it recognizes that there are transactionlogs available in the LOG AREA and starts to recover them. Depending on your LOG AREA size this can really take some time
"Cancelling" a startup is a nice one ... how did you do that? Honestly you cannot actually cancel the startup once it's triggered. What you can do is: monitor if the db is doing anything via x_cons show active (resp. db_cons show active).
In any case: while the database is doing the recovery it's obvious that another startup-command doesn't make any sense - so it's refused with a "-104, DBM command impossible at this time"
If the situation is not resolved by now and this is a production system or the go-life date is due on monday then it time to open a Prio Very High SAP Support message and have this fixed by the support experts.
Best Regards,
Lars