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Jun 11

ORA-00904: “UTL_RAW”.”CAST_FROM_NUMBER”: invalid identifier

I have been migrating single instance databases to RAC databases and had several databases that filled up the diag directory spewing out alerts. There is a bug that can cause some of these, but in my case it was much simpler. Simple configuration mistakes

The first error was due to the existance of a spfile on the file system that was being read in.

the spfile was create in ASM, and $ORACLE_HOME/dbs/initdp0db#.ora was created on both nodes

However on node1, we still had $ORACLE_HOME/dbs/spfiledp0db1.ora

checking the spfile parameter in the database confirmed that this was the file being read in. The alert log wasn’t very helpful just spewing out the following.

Emon ping encountered error 12801
Errors in file /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/dp0db/dp0db1/trace/dp0db1_q00p_617988.trc:
ORA-12801: error signaled in parallel query server PZ99, instance node2:dp0db2 (2)
ORA-00904: "UTL_RAW"."CAST_FROM_NUMBER": invalid identifier
Thu Jun 11 11:54:19 2015

The second issue I ran into that also filled up the diag directory was due to bad permissions on one of the nodes on the audit directory. This generated the exact same error as above in the log file.

If you see this error check the following

  • on each node check the value of the spfile in the databse, they should both be pointing to the ASM spfile
  • check the location of the audit directory and make sure it exists and oracle can write to it

These were simple mistakes that caused a huge headache.

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