Expanding an oracle standby database

If you have an application using both a primary and a secondary database you might experienced the error  ORA-279. This can occur if you expand your primary database with new data files without updating your standby database.

When the archive log containing the expansion gets applied to your standby database you will see the following error in your alert log:

Parallel Media Recovery started
ORA-279 signalled during: ALTER DATABASE RECOVER  database until time '2018-04-23:09:12:17' using backup controlfile  ...
ALTER DATABASE RECOVER    CONTINUE DEFAULT
Media Recovery Log /archive-file
Mon Apr 23 09:44:37 2018
File #72 added to control file as 'UNNAMED00072'. Originally created as:
'newly-added-file.dbf'
Recovery interrupted!

The fix to this problem is to tell the standby database about the new file.

Standby database> sqlplus / as sysdba

• alter database create datafile 'UNNAMED00072' as 'newly-added-file.dbf';

And now re-run the recover process. It should pass with no errors. The UNNAMED# will of course vary for each install. Use your alert log for the exact info.