Archiver error - Archive location full (ORA-16014)

[Arjen Visser]

If the following error is encountered:

ERROR: ORA-00257: archiver error. Connect internal only, until freed. Enter user-name: SP2-0306: Invalid option.Enter user-name: SP2-0306:
Invalid option.SP2-0157: unable to CONNECT to ORACLE after 3 attempts, exiting SQL*Plus
Dbvisit terminated.
Return code = 433

Or 16014:
ORA-16014: log 1 sequence# 1725 not archived, no available destinations[/COLOR]

Or if the following message is found in the alert.log:
ARC0: Failed to archive thread


Connect to rman:
RMAN> connect target /

Synchronise the RMAN repository so that it knows about the deleted archive logs use command:
RMAN> crosscheck archivelog all;
You can schedule this command once a week.

This command is different in 8i (although it would probably still work in later versions of RMAN):
RMAN> change archivelog all crosscheck;

Note:
The crosscheck command does not delete the information about the logs that it could not find on disk, it just updates their status in the repository as 'EXPIRED'.
To obtain a list of logs marked as 'EXPIRED' use the following command:
RMAN> list expired archivelog all;

If it is not necessary to keep the information about these logs in the repository, delete them with command:
RMAN> delete expired archivelog all;

Another option to avoid the problem with RMAN complaining about logs that were manually deleted from disk is to modify the RMAN backup script and add
"skip inaccessible" to the command that backs up the archive logs.

Example:
backup archivelog all format '…' skip inaccessible;

[Arjen Visser]

To remove archive logs from RMAN directly, the following command can be used. Note that this does not check or verify if the archive log is still needed by Dbvisit Standby:

RMAN> DELETE NOPROMPT ARCHIVELOG UNTIL TIME "SYSDATE-14"

The above command removes all archive logs older than 14 days.