Bug 6150680  ORA-38788 / ORA-38784 from CREATE RESTORE POINT GUARANTEE FLASHBACK DATABASE

Affects:

Product (Component)	Oracle Server (Rdbms)
Range of versions believed to be affected	Versions BELOW 11.2
Versions confirmed as being affected	10.2.0.4 10.2.0.3
Platforms affected	Generic (all / most platforms affected)

Fixed:

This issue is fixed in

11.1.0.7 (Server Patch Set) 10.2.0.5 (Server Patch Set)

Description

CREATE RESTORE POINT  GUARANTEE FLASHBACK DATABASE
can fail consistently with ORA-38788 / ORA-38784 on a
physical standby database.
 
This can occur if:
 - flashback database is disabled:
    select FLASHBACK_ON from v$database;
   returns NO
 - this is on a standby database
    select controlfile_type from v$database;
   returns STANDBY
 - there are read-only datafiles, eg on the standby do this:
    alter database open read only;
    select file_name from dba_data_files
     where tablespace_name in
     (select tablespace_name from dba_tablespaces
      where status='READ ONLY');
 - for any given read-only datafile above, it is "clean"
   ie: it does not need any more recovery, the checkpointSCN
   in the datafile header matches the one in the datafile's
   controlfile entry (kccfe). To see these SCNs do this:
    alter session set events 'immediate trace name file_hdrs level 10';
 - CREATE RESTORE POINT  GUARANTEE FLASHBACK DATABASE
   fails with this pair of errors:
    ORA-38784: Cannot create restore point 'RPTEST1'.
    ORA-38788: More standby database recovery is needed Workaround Do "alter database flashback on;" and then try doing the
    CREATE RESTORE POINT  GUARANTEE FLASHBACK DATABASE
  The command should succeed this time.
 

References

Bug:6150680 (This link will only work for PUBLISHED bugs)
Note:245840.1 Information on the sections in this article