Oracle XE Corruption

  • From: Evan Pettrey <jepettrey@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Oracle-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:31:49 -0400

Hello all,



I’ve just taken a job as a sys admin with a company who uses an Oracle XE
database on one of their production machines and it is exceptionally
important for me to limit downtime.



Immediately upon taking the position I setup backups and an alerting system.
Well yesterday I started getting an alert that their Oracle DB server was
running out of space. After further investigation I learned that one of
their bdump trace files was growing at a rate of nearly 1GB a day. At this
rate, the hard drive will run out of space sometime in the next few days.



As such, I began poking around to see why this trace log was growing so fast
and so large. By looking through the log I was able to determine that the
error was with Object ID 576 and has existed since at least January (I’ve
only been here a few weeks).



I checked to see what object 576 was and determined that it is:



SQL> select object_name, object_type from dba_objects where object_id = 576;

OBJECT_NAME
 ------------------------------

OBJECT_TYPE
 ------------------------------

SMON_SCN_TIME_TIM_IDX
INDEX





Since the corruption has been around since at least January, restoring the
database from a backup really isn’t option...this object index needs to be
rebuilt.



I know I can rebuild the object by running:



alter index smon_scn_time_tim_idx rebuild;



However I’m not sure that this will actually resolve the issue fully and I
can’t afford to create other problems in the process, leading to the
database not being functional after working on it. The database apparently
takes around 30 minutes to bring back up after it has been shutdown so I
don’t want to have to do this more than once.



I’m not a DBA and am a little lost at this point in time. A previous
co-worker of mine suggested this would be a good place to see help since
Oracle XE isn’t supported by Oracle and I don’t have a metalink account. If
anybody could help me out I would greatly appreciate it.





Thanks in advance.





Regards,

Evan

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