Finding the SCN in the Alert Log

The Oracle documentation says you can examine the alert.log to find the SCN of the event and recover to a prior SCN. But I was unable to find any SCN in the Alert Log except the time at which I dropped my testing tablespace. Please help.

The Oracle documentation says "You can also examine the alert.log to find the SCN of the event and recover to a prior SCN. Alternatively, you can determine the log sequence number that contains the recovery termination SCN, and then recover through that log."

But I was unable to find any SCN in the Alert Log except the time at which I dropped my testing tablespace. Secondly, how can I determine log sequence with recovery termination? Please help.

Unfortunately, the documentation is not exactly correct in this case.

It is rare that I find a SCN listed in my Alert Log. So you will have to use a different method. Instead of recovering via SCN, you can recover using a time. And the Alert Log does contain timestamps.

Alternatively, if you know the time, you can have Oracle determine the SCN for you with the DBMS_FLASHBACK.TIMESTAMP_TO_SCN function. This does require the database to be operational.

This was last published in August 2005

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