Resolving Gaps in Data Guard Apply Using Incremental RMAN Backup

I found quite a few blog entries on the web and off course the Oracle Documentation also helped. The reason I want to create a post is that I encountered 2 problems that I first had to overcome before the Physical Standby was in sync again. A sort overview of the problem and the steps to overcome them are:

On the standby get the current scn which will be used in your RMAN backup script as a starting point. 

SQL>select current_scn FROM V$DATABASE;

     CURRENT_SCN

----------------

11133157117269

 On the primary run the RMAN script with the supplied current_scn number from the standby 

run {

allocate channel c1 type disk format '/dump/abcprd/%U.rmb';

backup as compressed backupset skip readonly incremental from scn 11133157117269 database;

And this is were I got my first unexpected problem. The RMAN backup gave the following warning message:

RMAN-06755: WARNING: datafile 408: incremental-start SCN is too recent; using checkpoint SCN 9733080640801 instead

File 408 is a Read Only Tablespace with a much older scn number. V$SESSION_LONGOPS showed that the backup will take longer than 24 hours to complete, so I immediately stopped it and reset the Read Only Tablespace's scn number with the aim that it will shorten the duration of the RMAN backup. 

SQL> alter tablespace SA_ORD_RO read write ;
SQL> alter tablespace SA_ORD_RO read only ;

I restarted the RMAN backup, it did not give the warning again, but still took 16 hours to complete. All files created by the backup were copied to the standby server. I also created a new standby controlfile:

RMAN> backup current controlfile for standby format '/usr/users/oracle/ForStandbyCTRL.bck';

On the standby server I cataloged and then restored the controlfile 

RMAN> catalog start with ' /dump/backup/';

RMAN> restore standby controlfile from '/dump/backup/ForStandbyCTRL.bck';

And the recover script:

RMAN> catalog start with ' /dump/abcprd/';

RMAN> recover database noredo;

But the Incremental backup failed almost immediately with the error

RMAN-06094: datafile 569 must be restored

It turns out that datafile 569 was created on the primary after the gap occured, but before the rman incremental was run. So the controlfile was aware of the datafile, but the file was not on the standby server. I also need to do a datafile backup for the newly created datafile. So back to Primary:

RMAN> backup datafile 569;
scp the file to the standby server and restore it on the standby server:
RMAN> restore datafile 569;

This time I could start the RMAN> recover database noredo; again and it completed successfully.