RMAN-06172

Prompted by a recent interview I wanted to perform a little test with RMAN, and incrementally updated backups. I created a 11.2.0.2.5 database on my Linux (OEL 5.5) test system and refreshed my understanding of this most useful rman feature (which is for another post).

So after I was happy with the working of the incrementally updated image copies I decided to see if I could restore my database with those. Time to use “drop database”, which removes spfile, data files, temp files and the control files. Tabula rasa!

But it didn’t matter I thought: I have controlfile/spfile autobackups and fully recovered image copies plus all the archived logs in the FRA. What could possibly go wrong? Well it took me 30 minutes to get the database back.

ORA-4031