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Don't trust the lying (Data Guard) broker

One of the new 12c features is the "VALIDATE DATABASE" command. According to the documentation it should do many thorough checks and tell you if all is configured well and correctly. However, there is one catch - or to put it a little more bluntly - bug. Or two.

You know that you need standby redo logs for SYNC (or the new FASTSYNC) transport mode. The validate command knows that, too. And you know that you should have one more standby redo log than online redo logs. The validate command seems to know this one as well.

However, the checks appear to have one flaw: they test whether the threads (and let's talk here about a single-instance, so we have only thread #1) have enough standby redo logs (SRLs) assigned. But when you create an SRL with 'alter database add standby logfile', they are unassigned to any thread. In fact, you get 0 as thread#: 

select thread#, sequence# from V$STANDBY_LOG;

THREAD# SEQUENCE#
------- ---------
      0         0
      0         0
      0         0
      0         0
Which is perfectly fine - Oracle waits until the instance actually needs the SRL and only then is this assigned. Makes the administration easier.

But the guys responsible for VALIDATE DATABASE do not seem to realize this. So if you have just set up your SRLs and run the validate command - just to see if the config is all ok (e.g. because you just want to change the LogXptMode and protection mode) then you will get a result like this:
Thread #  Online Redo Log Groups  Standby Redo Log Groups Status
              (CDB5)                  (CDB5SBY)
    1         3                       0                       Insufficient SRLs
    Warning: standby redo logs not configured for thread 1 on CDB5SBY

WTF? Yes, the validate command did not understand that we have plenty of SRLs, only that they have not yet been assigned to any thread.

So.. we do a switchover, back and forth, to let both databases touch the SRLs and...

Thread #  Online Redo Log Groups  Standby Redo Log Groups Status
              (CDB5)                  (CDB5SBY)
    1         3                       2                       Insufficient SRLs

And we still receive a warning - although we have created 4 SRLs, only two of which Oracle has required so far...with the other two currently unassigned. Again, VALIDATE DATABASE is not aware of this and complains.

The morale? Don't just trust the command, especially in the beginning, when your configuration is fresh and still settling down. Although that's exactly the time you want to use checks like this.

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