random things

I was trying to load database from an RMAN backup (duplicate database until …), and the restore process died after some time, and gave me the following error messages (I have tried it several times, with different backups, these repeated randomly):

ORA-19502: write error on file "/path/to/datafile.dbf", blockno 1669073 (blocksize=8192)
ORA-27072: File I/O error
Linux Error: 2: No such file or directory


ORA-19502: write error on file "/path/to/datafile.dbf", blockno 1831475 (blocksize=8192)
ORA-27072: File I/O error
Linux Error: 13: Permission denied


Long story short, these messages are exotic forms of the boring “Out of disk space” message.

And even if you have enough space for the restore, you may need ~+20% spare space. Don’t know exactly why, but that was needed in my case.

Oracle loves disk space and strange messages – lesson learned.