ORA-10878:  Parallel Recovery Slave Died Unexpectedly Tips

Question:  I am getting the ORA-10878 error.  How do I fix the ORA-10878 error?

Answer:  This may be a bug, and you can disable parallel recovery as a workaround.

The oerr utility shows these details for the ORA-10878 error:

ORA-10878:  parallel recovery slave died unexpectedly  

Cause:  A parallel recovery slave died unexpectedly, PMON cleaning up the process.  

Action:  Check your system for anomalies and reissue the statement. If this error persists, contact Oracle Support Services. See trace file for more details.

Details on the ORA-10878 error are provided in Read MOSC note 9728806.8 and note 315631.1.  

Laurent Schneider notes that you can get the ORA-10878 error during a DUPLICATE or a RESTORE command.  You can disable parallel media recovery by setting the hidden parameter  _log_parallelism_max=1.  

You should open an SR on MOSC for  this bug and never change _log_parallelism_max without the consent of Oracle technical support.

Laurent notes that for a RECOVER, the option RECOVER NOPARALLEL must be safer, and there is no DUPLICATE NOPARALLEL recovery command option.  

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