A program inserts via OCI DirectPath telemetry data into a time-based partition every
30 seconds, each insert acquiring an exclusive lock on the table. The users decided
to further split the partition receiving the inserts by time. Each of the new
partitions is stale, by that I mean their high values are all previous to the present
data. The split was done on December 4th carved out partitions for November 26, 27,
28, 29, and 30. While the split is going on, the program buffered the next inserts.
Once the split is done the program continues its inserts into the original partition.
(During the split Oracle acquires locks which prevent data manipulation)
I realize that splitting a partition on the fly like this is a silly thing to do. It
was never going to be part of the production system. However I was not sure if doing
so would work. We tried it and the result may have been data dictionary corruption;
i.e., ORA-8103 errors. Data in the November 26, November 27, about 22.5 hours of
November 28, November 29, November 30 and the input partition remain visible. It's
only the 1/5 hours of the November 28th partition which is inaccessible. In a way
it's very much like a block corruption problem. Some additional information: all
objects in the database are valid, all indexes are usable, besides there were no
indexes involved in the split operation. DBV reports no problem with any of the
database files.
Oracle support also blames it on the split activity. I am anxious because there is a
big push to put this system into production. I need to be sure the corruption was
caused by the split. We won't be that silly again. Unfortunately the corruption was
not discovered immediately afterwards. The split as the cause is really just a
guess. Has anyone else seen unexplained 8103 errors after partition management?
Ian MacGregor
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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