7.5. Summary

This chapter focused on how to identify and resolve physical corruption at the block level. We began with an overview of block corruption, how block corruption occurs, what the symptoms are, and how to identify block corruption using system logs, application logs, database logs, and trace files.

Next, we described in detail the methods for dealing with physical corruption. We discussed the ANALYZE TABLE table_name command, the DBVERIFY utility, the DB_BLOCK_CHECKING initialization parameter, and the DBMS_REPAIR package. You saw examples of how to use each of these methods to detect and repair block corruption.

Finally, we showed you how to use RMAN Block Media Recovery (BMR) to repair block corruption. This is a new Oracle 10g capability in RMAN and has many advantages over recovering the entire datafile.