Table Recovery – How We Rescued Dropped Tables in 19.23 Release

 Release 19.23 was cruising smoothly—until we hit a pothole.

In a moment of chaos during a deployment cycle, two critical tables in our Oracle database—ETL_COMMONRACE_TBD and ETL_COMMONRACE_HIST_TBD—were accidentally dropped. What followed was a war room scenario involving RMAN, SCNs, and an unexpected twist involving pluggable database parameters.

Here's how we restored order from disorder.

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The Problem

Two essential tables went missing from REGIY2K_DBO. Attempts to recover them using RMAN's RECOVER TABLE command were met with repeated failures.

The error logs screamed:

RMAN-03002: failure of recover command
ORA-03114: not connected to ORACLE
RMAN-03009: failure of sql command on clone_default channel
ORA-01092: ORACLE instance terminated. Disconnection forced

Diagnosis

After some deep digging, we realized that the problem lay in the default behavior of Oracle attempting to open a pluggable database (PDB) when setting up the auxiliary instance during the table recovery.

But our target environment was non-CDB (not using pluggable databases).

The solution lay in the overlooked—but powerful—initaux.ora configuration.

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The Fix: Disabling Pluggable DBs

We created an auxiliary parameter file with a critical line:

enable_pluggable_database=FALSE

This setting prevented RMAN from treating the auxiliary as a PDB environment, which avoided the ORA-01092 instance termination error.

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🔁 The Recovery Command

Here’s the RMAN recovery script that finally worked:

nohup rman target / @restore_table.rmn log=restore_tables.log &

run
{
  SET AUXILIARY INSTANCE PARAMETER FILE TO '/home/oracle/initaux.ora'
  RECOVER TABLE REGIY2K_DBO.ETL_COMMONRACE_HIST_TBD, REGIY2K_DBO.ETL_COMMONRACE_TBD
  UNTIL SCN 8311804385864
  AUXILIARY DESTINATION '/restoredb/restore/'
  datapump destination '/restoredb/restore/dpump/'
  dump file 'export.dmp'
  notableimport KEEP AUXILIARY;
}

And the contents of initaux.ora:

sga_target=20G
sga_max_size=20G
enable_pluggable_database=FALSE

With that in place, we were able to:

• Avoided catalog connection 

• Get past the ORA-03113 and ORA-03114 disconnection errors

• Successfully restore the dropped tables to their original state

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 The Outcome

Once restored, the tables were validated against backups, and a Data Pump export confirmed integrity. The system was back online with zero data loss and minimal downtime.

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💡 Lessons Learned

• Always double-check your DROP TABLE statements, especially in live environments.

• In Oracle 19c+, PDB-related flags can cause unexpected issues, even if you don’t use pluggable databases.

• Custom parameter files like initaux.ora give you full control over recovery context.

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