In this Document

Applies to:

Purpose

Oracle classifies the Data File Block corruptions as Physical and Logical.  This is also referred as intra block corruptions.  This document is intended to provide detailed information and errors example about it.

Scope

This document is intended for Database Administrators.

Details

Physical Block Corruptions

This kind of block corruptions are normally reported by Oracle with error ORA-1578 and the detailed corruption description is printed in the alert log. 

Corruption Examples are:

• Bad header - the beginning of the block (cache header) is corrupt with invalid values
• The block is Fractured/Incomplete - header and footer of the block do not match
• The block checksum is invalid
• The block is misplaced
• Zeroed out blocks / ORA-8103

Detailed Corruption Description:

Fractured Block

A Fractured block means that the block is incomplete. Information from the block header does not match the block tail.

Bad Checksum

Block Checksums are used to identify if the block was changed by something external to Oracle and after the block was last written by Oracle.
Checksum is calculated by DBWR or direct loader before writing the block to disk and stored in the block header. Every time that the block is read and if db_block_checksum is different than false, Oracle calculates a checksum and compares it to the one stored in the block header. Reference Note 30706.1

Example of a corrupt block due to invalid checksum:

A value different than zero (0x0) in "computed block checksum" means that the checksum
differs and the result of this comparison is printed. 

Block Misplaced

This is when Oracle detected that the content of the block being read belongs to a different block and the checksum is valid:

Logical Block Corruptions

This is when block contains a valid checksum and the structure below the beginning of the block is corrupt (Block content is corrupt). It may cause different ORA-600 errors. 

The detailed corruption description for Logical Corruptions are not normally printed in the alert.log. DBVerify will report what is logically corrupted in the block.

Corruption Examples are:

• row locked by non-existent transaction - ORA-600 [4512],etc
•  the amount of space used is not equal to block size
• avsp bad
• etc.

When db_block_checking is enabled, it may produce the internal errors ORA-600 [kddummy_blkchk] or ORA-600 [kdBlkCheckError].

If db_block_checking is enabled and the block is already logically corrupt on disk, the next block update will mark the block as Soft Corrupt and future reads of this block will produce the error ORA-1578. In that case DBVerify reports this corruption with error "DBV-200: Block, dba <rdba>, already marked corrupted".

References