FORCE LOGGING is irrelevant in NOARCHIVELOG mode

FORCE LOGGING is irrelevant in NOARCHIVELOG mode; this was a change introduced in 11g.

Applies to:

Oracle Server - Enterprise Edition - Version: 11.1.0.6 to 11.2.0.2 - Release: 11.1 to 11.2
Information in this document applies to any platform.

Symptoms

ORA-1578 and ORA-26040 produced due to NOLOGGING for DIRECT PATH operations after a manual RECOVER DATABASE in a NOARCHIVELOG mode database even if FORCE LOGGING is enabled in the database or LOGGING is defined for the segment.

This is most commonly seen in AWR objects stored in the SYSAUX tablespace.

Cause

This is a expected behavior in 11g.

All direct-path operations in NOARCHIVELOG mode are non-logged and generate invalidation redo. If media recovery is manually invoked (ALTER DATABASE RECOVER DATABASE) in NOARCHIVELOG mode then blocks will be marked invalid/corrupt when direct-path operations are replayed which will produce errors ORA-1578 / ORA-26040 in the next block reads.

FORCE LOGGING is irrelevant in NOARCHIVELOG mode; this was a change introduced in 11g.

This restriction has been lifted in future release 11.2.0.2 by the fix of Bug 9739664.  See Note 9739664.8

Solution

To prevent the issue from happening, enable ARCHIVELOG mode or avoid running a manual RECOVER like:

RECOVER DATABASE
ALTER DATABASE RECOVER DATABASE;

instead issue a STARTUP as crash recovery will ignore invalidation redo.

To fix the error ORA-1578 / ORA-26040, recreate the object.