Oracle 11.1.0.7.0 bug

This week, two days back I hit a bug in Oracle 11.1.0.7.0

If you get following error while database start up or if your database crashed due to SAN unavailability, unexpected server crash, power outage etc and if you're starting database and get following error.

ORA-27167: Attempt to determine if Oracle binary image is stored on remote server failed
ORA-27300: OS system dependent operation:parse_df failed with status: 2
ORA-27301: OS failure message: No such file or directory
ORA-27302: failure occurred at: parse failed


$ sqlplus '/as sysdba'
SQL*Plus: Release 11.1.0.7.0 - Production on Thu Jun 24 07:27:29 2010
Copyright (c) 1982, 2008, Oracle. All rights reserved.
Connected to an idle instance.
SQL> startup
ORA-00445: background process "MMNL" did not start after 120 seconds
This error indicate that you have hit a bug 6813883 on oracle 11.1.0.7 version [Metalink article id: 784754.1]

After installing patch 6813883 using Opatch utility database startup went very well and now databases are running like a Piece of cake!

Hope this helps someone...

Oracle Kernel Parameters in Solaris 10

In case of Solaris9, edit shared memory and semaphore kernel parameters in /etc/system using the calculations and rules of thumb from the oracle install manual.

The following table identifies the now obsolete IPC tunable and their replacement resource controls.



In case of Solaris 10, the Solaris resource management facilities are used to set resource limits for Oracle rather than /etc/system parameters. The /etc/system should not be edited with resource limits, so only a single parameter should be added to /etc/system:

set noexec_user_stack=1

For Solaris10, add a project for the oracle user and set the recommended resource limits:

# projadd -U oracle user.oracle
# projmod -s -K "project.max-sem-ids=(priv,100,deny)" user.oracle
# projmod -s -K "project.max-sem-nsems=(priv,256,deny)" user.oracle
# projmod -s -K "project.max-shm-memory=(priv,4294967295,deny)" user.oracle
# projmod -s -K "project.max-shm-ids=(priv,100,deny)" user.oracle

(To check the project settings: prctl -i project user.oracle)

- Reboot machine after changing /etc/system to put new settings into effect.

Oracle Parameters on Solaris 10

With the availability of the Solaris 10 operating system, the way IPC facilities (e.g., shared memory, message queues, etc.) are managed changed. In previous releases of the Solaris operating system, editing /etc/system was the recommended way to increase the values of a given IPC tunable. With the release of Solaris 10, IPC tunable are now managed through the Solaris resource manager. The resource manager makes each tunable available through one or more resource controls, which provide an upper bound on the size of a given resource.

below diagram shows recommended parameter values for Oracle on Sun Solaris 10 OS.