Thank you to everyone for the suggestions. Based on an e-mail that arrived
outside the list, I did a little more checking. The ORA-1555 errors only
occurred when running statements that did index lookups or scans. When a FULL
hint was applied to the statements, the error went away.
Based on this, we did a rebuild on all indexes of the 4 tables that were having
this problem and it appears that our problem has gone away. It would be nice
to know exactly what caused the situation in the first place, but I won't lose
any sleep over not knowing.
Matt Adams
"It will make sense when you stop thinking logically,
and start thinking Oracle-ly" - Ken Droppa
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of Matt Adams
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2016 3:24 PM
To: Oracle L
Subject: Weird ORA-1555 error
I've seen ORA-1555 (snapshot too old) lots of times in the past and they always
seemed to be caused by 1 of 2 scenarios.
Either an image of a block needed by a long running query is not available
because another session has modified and committed a change to the block and
the 'before modification' image of the block is no longer available in the
rollback segments. (common) Or it's a delayed block cleanout issue where the
ITL in the block header needs maintenance. (uncommon, but not exceedingly rare)
I'm now getting an ORA-1555 error that doesn't seem to fit either case.
This particular table is roughly 11 million rows in a database 10 terrabytes in
size and not terrible busy. There's 300 Gig of undo tablespace and
UNDO_RETENTION is set for 40 hours. (don't ask why 40 hours. I didn't set it
up that way and nobody seems to remember why it was set that way)
Running the following query returns an error in anywhere from 2 to 10 seconds.
SQL> select count(*) from app_owner.type_history;
select count(*) from hri1_owner.type_history
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01555: snapshot too old: rollback segment number 491 with name
"_SYSSMU491_93190984$" too small
The error is repeatable, with the same rollback segment (number 491) listed
every time.
Since I'm getting this error in sometimes as little as 2 seconds or so, the
first scenario I described above doesn't seem to apply.
Usually, the recommended action to eliminate problems with delayed block
cleanout is to either gather stats on the table or do a 'select * from table'
to force oracle to visit every block. That doesn't seem to be working here.
All attempts to analyze the table or select count(*) from the table get the
same ORA-1555 error
This is v 11.2.0.4 (EE) on solaris.
Searches on the web and metalink (yes, I still call it that) have proven
fruitless so far.
Anybody have any thoughts on why this might be occurring?
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