Rushing = Stupid Mistakes

I am currently being asked to refresh a database. The end users are pissed because they asked for the database to be refreshed at noon yesterday, this was the first they had asked for it, and they were doing “really important things” and by 3pm were pissed that I hadn’t responded to them, let alone completed the work. The thing was, I took a vacation. I took a whole two days off to spend some time with my girlfriend and wasn’t checking my email. Never mind that we have a whole team of DBAs that can refresh a database, they had emailed me. What they should have done was open a proper ticket, and someone would have helped out even though they hadn’t planned and were now in a panic.

So After escalating it to their boss because I wasn’t providing them with “good service”, who in turn talked to my boss, who informed him how they had dropped the ball, and I would deal with it today, that they were being completely unprofessional. (My boss is a good guy, and sticks up for me).

So here is the technical part of this post. Ever DBA has cloned a database, thousands and thousands of databases, but when you are rushing you can make stupid errors. I just fought this error for 20 minutes

Oracle instance shut down
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of Duplicate Db command at 06/08/2016 14:23:04
RMAN-05501: aborting duplication of target database
RMAN-03015: error occurred in stored script Memory Script
ORA-27191: sbtinfo2 returned error
Additional information: 3480

This should have been a no brainier, but in my rush I wasn’t fully paying attention to the error.

I was just issuing the command

duplicate target database to testdb from active database

My defaults for RMAN are using sbt ie tape, so for some reason the tape channels were being loaded. This causes an error. The solution is simple and should have been fairly immediate, just allocate disk channels.

run
{
ALLOCATE CHANNEL d1 TYPE DISK ;
ALLOCATE CHANNEL d2 TYPE DISK ;
ALLOCATE CHANNEL d3 TYPE DISK ;
ALLOCATE AUXILIARY CHANNEL a1 TYPE DISK ;
ALLOCATE AUXILIARY CHANNEL a2 TYPE DISK ;
ALLOCATE AUXILIARY CHANNEL a3 TYPE DISK ;
duplicate target database to testdb from active database;
}

Even simple things become very hard when you are rushing.