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Friday, November 27, 2009

TSPITR to recover a dropped tablespace

A nice feature of Oracle 11gR2 is the ability to recover a dropped tablespace using TSPITR. Of course, in order to succeed this, you need valid backups. Let's test this! First of all, just to be on the safe side, take a fresh backup of the database:
BACKUP DATABASE PLUS ARCHIVELOG;

Then supposing you have a "MUCI" tablespace, simply drop it:
drop tablespace MUCI including contents;

Let's try to recover "MUCI" tablespace. You'll need the nearest timestamp or SCN before the tablespace was dropped.

If you are tempted to use fully automatic TSPITR then be prepared for troubles. This is what happen to me when I tried it:
RMAN> recover tablespace muci until scn 2240386 auxiliary destination '/u01/app/backup';

...

RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of recover command at 11/27/2009 21:57:13
RMAN-06965: Datapump job has stopped
RMAN-06961: IMPDP> Job "SYS"."TSPITR_IMP_hilc" stopped due to fatal error at 21:57:09
RMAN-06961: IMPDP> ORA-39123: Data Pump transportable tablespace job aborted
ORA-01565: error in identifying file '/u01/app/oracle/oradata/TETRIS/datafile/o1_mf_muci_5k0bwdmb_.dbf'
ORA-27037: unable to obtain file status
Linux Error: 2: No such file or directory
Additional information: 3


I google it and found this post which recommends to drop the tablespace without "AND DATAFILES" but, as far as I'm concerned, it didn't work.
Nevertheless, setting a new name for the datafile which belongs to the dropped datafile did the job.
RMAN> run {
2> set newname for datafile 6 to new;
3> recover tablespace muci until scn 2240386 auxiliary destination '/u01/app/backup';
4> }

A direct consequence of this in 11gR2 is that you can apply multiple TSPITR for the same tablespace without using a recovery catalog. If you chosen a wrong SCN and you already brought the recovered tablespace ONLINE then you can simply drop it and try again with another SCN.

Awesome!

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