Overview of Instance and Crash Recovery

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Overview of Instance and Crash Recovery

Crash recovery is used to recover from a failure either when a single-instance database fails or all instances of an Oracle Real Application Clusters database fail. Instance recovery refers to the case where a surviving instance recovers a failed instance in an Oracle Real Application Clusters database.

The goal of crash and instance recovery is to restore the data block changes located in the cache of the terminated instance and to close the redo thread that was left open. Instance and crash recovery use only online redo log files and current online datafiles. Oracle recovers the redo threads of the terminated instances together.

Crash and instance recovery involve two distinct operations: rolling forward the current, online datafiles by applying both committed and uncommitted transactions contained in online redo records, and then rolling back changes made in uncommitted transactions to their original state.

Crash and instance recovery have the following shared characteristics:

• Redo the changes using the current online datafiles (as left on disk after the failure or SHUTDOWN ABORT)

• Use only the online redo logs and never require the use of the archived logs

• Have a recovery time governed by the number of terminated instances, amount of redo generated in each terminated redo thread since the last checkpoint, and by user-configurable factors such as the number and size of redo log files, checkpoint frequency, and the parallel recovery setting

Oracle performs this recovery automatically on two occasions:

• At the first database open after the failure of a single-instance database or all instances of an Oracle Real Applications Cluster database (crash recovery).

• When some but not all instances of an Oracle Real Application Clusters configuration fail (instance recovery). The recovery is performed automatically by a surviving instance in the configuration.

The important point is that in both crash and instance recovery, Oracle applies the redo automatically: no user intervention is required to supply redo logs. However, you can set parameters in the database server that can tune the duration of instance and crash recovery performance. Also, you can tune the rolling forward and rolling back phases of instance recovery separately.