In this Document
Symptoms
Cause
Solution
Applies to:
Oracle Server - Enterprise Edition - Version: 11.2.0.1 and later [Release: 11.2 and later ]
Information in this document applies to any platform.
Symptoms
RMAN startup nomount failed with ORA-4031
Customer was testing RMAN backup/restore in Exadata. Customer firstly backup the database to tape and then remove all the datafiles, spfile, controlfiles for testing. Then during the recover, customer connected RMAN with nocatalog and try to “startup nomount”, then ORA-4031 occured.
==================== Log ========================
oracle@hkfop011db01:/home/oracle
$ export ORACLE_SID=TEST
oracle@test011db01:/home/oracle
$ rman target / nocatalog
Recovery Manager: Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production on Thu Jul 8 20:45:10 2010
Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
connected to target database (not started)
RMAN> startup nomount
startup failed: ORA-01078: failure in processing system parameters
LRM-00109: could not open parameter file '/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/dbs/initTEST.ora'
starting Oracle instance without parameter file for retrieval of spfile
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of startup command at 07/08/2010 20:45:19
RMAN-04014: startup failed: ORA-04031: unable to allocate 111264 bytes of shared memory ("shared pool","unknown object","sga heap(1,0)","KEWS sesstat values")
Cause
RMAN has failed to start a dummy instance without pfile.
Default values used for the dummy instance are not enough to start the instance up.
This is reported in bug:9680987 - RMAN CANNOT START DATABASE WITHOUT PARAMETER FILE
Solution
There are two possible solutions:
- Create temporary init.ora file (/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1/dbs/initTEST.ora) with the following parameters:
db_name=<db_name>
large_pool_size=100m
shared_pool_size=250m
db_cache_size=10m
- Set environment variable ORA_RMAN_SGA_TARGET before executing rman. For example:
$ export ORA_RMAN_SGA_TARGET=350