Database Startup Problem

Last week the database on my local machine went down. I don’t use it much apart from trying out my pl\sql challenge questions. So I didn’t bother about looking into the problem later until today. So today I set out to see what the problem could be. I restarted the oracle service from services. I connected using the sys to the idle instance and tried to open the database. The database seems to have been mounted. But when I ran the below command I got the below error.

Alter database open;

ORA-38760: This database instance failed to turn on flashback database

This is clearly because the flashback log has been filled up. In the init.ora file the parameter db_recovery_file_dest_size was set to a value of 2147483648. When I checked the location of the db_recovery_file_dest the size was about 2GB. So I guess since the memory exceeded the value in the init.ora file the database could no longer write flashback data into the destination location. I tried to delete the files from the flashback destination directory but things did not work out. I shut the database down. Mounted the database, turned off flashback and restarted my database without any issues.

> Shutdown
> Startup no mount
> Alter database mount;
> Alter database flashback off;
> Alter database open;

With the above commands executed successfully, database seems to working like a jiffy.