Allow me to present the snapshot of a day from the life of John--the
DBA at Acme Bank. On this particular day a database John manages
crashed entirely and had to be restored from the backup. He takes
regular (backupset) RMAN backups to tape. Since
everything--including the controlfile--had crashed, John had to
first restore the controlfile and then restore the database. The
controlfile is always backed up with the backup database command.
John was sure of that. However,
restore controlfile from
autobackup gave the error:
RMAN-06172: no AUTOBACKUP found or specified handle is not a valid copy or piece
Without the controlfile, the recovery was stuck, even though all the
valid pieces were there. It was a rather alarming situation. Others
would have panicked; but not John. As always, he managed to resolve
the situation by completing recovery. Interested to learn how? Read
on.
