ORA-00471: DBWR process terminated with error

[Brose]

Hello,
I run a lot of Oracle 9.2 DBs on HP-UX on itanium. Yesterday, I extended the oradata volume group and 2 minutes later, all DBs chrashed with the following messages:

System name: HP-UX
Node name: hgvb01
Release: B.11.23
Version: U
Machine: ia64
Instance name: P01RTBA9
Redo thread mounted by this instance: 1
Oracle process number: 2
Unix process pid: 17082, image: oracle@hgvb01 (PMON)

*** 2005-11-08 16:58:02.132
*** SESSION ID:(1.1) 2005-11-08 16:58:02.092
error 471 detected in background process
ORA-00471: DBWR process terminated with error

Can someone help ?
Thanks.
Olivier.

[AwadheshPandey]

Details of error:
ORA-00471: DBWR process terminated with error
Cause: The Database Writer process terminated abnormally.
Action: Check the accompanying messages, and the background process trace file. Correct the problem mentioned in the messages. Then shut down and restart the instance. If the trace file mentions any other background process messages, check the trace file for the mentioned process until the root message is found.

Regards,

Awadhesh

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi Olivier,

can you also post the error from the alert.log?

thanks
yogeeraj

[Brose]

Hello Yogeeraj,

Here is the message in the alert log:
Tue Nov 8 16:58:02 2005
Errors in file /oracle/oradb/admin/P01RTBA9/bdump/p01rtba9_pmon_17082.trc:
ORA-00471: DBWR process terminated with error
Tue Nov 8 16:58:02 2005
PMON: terminating instance due to error 471
Instance terminated by PMON, pid = 17082

I found on OSS (SAP) a note about a bug in Veritas cluster software. This may terminate the Oracle process with a kill-9 !
May be this is the problem ?

Thanks.
Olivier.

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi again,

have you been able to startup the database again after the crash?

thanks
yogeeraj

[Eric Antunes]

Hi Olivier,

"Yesterday, I extended the oradata volume group and 2 minutes later, all DBs chrashed with the following "

I don't think you should do this operation with the database running...

Best Regards,

Eric Antunes

[Brose]

Hi again,

I was able to restart all DBs after the crash.
If I need to increase the size of a file system, I should only unmount it before I execute the lvextend command. Extending the volume group should have no effect on a running system, amI right ?
Thanks.
Olivier.

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi again,

"normally" this operation should be rather transparent but still, to be cautious i would prefer to stop database operations during that interval..

maybe the experts can clarify more on this incident

kind regards
yogeeraj

[Patti Johnson]

The ora-00471 message indicates that the database writer could not write to the disk. If you unmount the filesystem, I'm assuming the datafiles are unavailable.
The DBWR process will fail if it can not access the disk, even for a short period of time.

Patti