Year: 2017

ORA-01503: CREATE CONTROLFILE failed on RMAN duplicate between RAC databases

It was while since I performed an RMAN duplicate from a RAC database to another RAC database. You may find this post useless as there’s a lot of information out there about the error I faced, but all my posts are kind of my own little diary.
So, basically. In order to successfully duplicate one database to another you may need this.

    – TNS setup on the server where the database to be duplicated is hosted. You need to be able to tnsping both, the target and the auxiliary database.

     – Create a parameter file and password file for the auxiliary and startup nomount the first instance.
    – Create a full backup of the target database including archivelogs.
    – Connect to rman to both the target and the auxiliary databases from the auxiliary server:
rman target sys/*****@ auxiliary /
    – Issue the duplicate command:

 duplicate target database to ;
This should successfully finish but I got this error:

RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of Duplicate Db command at 01/03/2017 18:29:58
RMAN-05501: aborting duplication of target database
RMAN-06136: ORACLE error from auxiliary database: ORA-01503: CREATE CONTROLFILE failed
ORA-12720: operation requires database is in EXCLUSIVE mode
I searched this and the culprit is that my parameter file for the auxiliary had this:

cluster_database = true

By MOS note “Rman duplicate fail with RMAN-06136, ORA-01503, ORA-12720, ORA-00494 enqueue [CF] (Doc ID 1335479.1)”. Duplicate from a RAC database to another RAC database is not supported, hence we need to modify the parameter cluster_database to false in the auxiliary database.
After doing this the duplicate finished correctly.
Thanks,

Alfredo

OEM 13c New Features – Corrective Actions

Today’s post is about another new feature of Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) 13c. Well, not a new feature itself but some awesome enhancements to Corrective Actions (CA).
In this new release 13c several new CA types were added, including “Add Space To Tablespace”, “Chef Recipe” for those who like automation and now can be added to Service Level Agreement (SLA) alerts and job status events.
I’m a big enthusiast of OEM jobs and now having the option to set a CA for them is just more than cool!
I wrote an article a year ago on IOUG’s Select journal about Corrective Actions and didn’t want to finish my day without setting a CA for job. But wait a minute, I know I can set CA for metrics using the “Metric and Collection Settings” page, but there’s no such thing for jobs.
Here’s how we setup a corrective action for jobs. First we need to enable events for jobs, this means that we as administrators decide what kind of job status will create an event.
In order to do this, you need to navigate to Setup -> Incidents -> Job Events
Step 1. Here you decide what job status and job severity generates an event.


Step 2. You decide if you want to generate events for jobs without targets.
Step 3. Choose the target you want to generate job events for.
Once you have the proper events setup, then the next step is to catch this event and do something with it. In this case fire a Corrective Action (CA). The only place we can catch these events and do something with them is an Incident Rule.
Navigate to Setup-> Incident -> Incident Rules
Then create or modify an existing Incident Rule Set. Inside this Rule Set create a new Rule to catch these job events. Inside the Rule Actions there’s a new section to Submit a Corrective Action.
Click on the “Select corrective action” and choose the CA from your CA Library.



Cool doesn’t it! One of the uses I can think of is with Database backup jobs. Sometimes the RMAN backup fails when is not able to find an archivelog and the solution is to run a crosscheck command and retry the backup job. This CA can do that for us and just notify us once it completes.
It still needs further testing but is another tool to save us time.
If you want information about the “Add Space To Tablespace” CA you better check Kellyn’s post about it.
http://dbakevlar.com/2016/04/em13c-corrective-actions/
Thanks,

Alfredo