Database accidentally left in backup mode

  • From: Janine Sisk <janine@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: oracle-l L <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:15:12 -0700

Oracle 11gR2, running on an Amazon CentOS Linux instance.

In order to use Amazon's snapshot feature for backups, I have a nightly script 
that executes "alter database begin backup", takes the snapshot, and then 
"alter database end backup".  Well, it seems that for reasons unknown, the 
snapshot process sometimes throws an error (on Amazon's end), and this has 
resulted in the database being left in backup mode for about a week.

This is not a crisis situation;  it's a test copy of a dev database and it's 
backed up other ways, so I could just scrap it and start over.  But I wanted to 
make this into a learning experience (not to mention a wake up call to make my 
script a bit more robust), so I decided to make sure I could recover from this. 

I checked with the person using the database and they haven't done anything 
that would add much new data, so I figured this would be easy.  However, I ran 
the "alter database end backup" about an hour ago, and "select file#, status 
from v$backup" still shows all files in active status, which means they are 
still in backup mode.

My question is two-fold:
- is it normal for it to take this long, and when should I start to worry?
- is there anywhere else I can look to see what is going on?

thanks,

janine

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