Undo retention, flashback query and ora-01555 snapshot too old

Setting up a fault aware database environment is in charge of regarding possible physical and logical error scenarios. On the physical side of the medal, you got real-application-cluster or dataguard at your disposal. The logical one usually comprises backup and replication. Recently, oracle and others introduced features that enables a database to recover from logical errors without or with less remote systems and data. Namely flashback is a powerful technology to look back into (query), back out (transaction) or fully restore (database) the history of data. Flashback of course takes accompanying (history) (meta)data to do its job, namely again, undo-before-images, archived-redo-logs and flashback-logs. So, essentially, the convenience of your course into history depends on the amount of history metadata that is available to the database at the time of a logical error, say an inadvertant delete from.

You may already have learned or heard about or even hardly experienced that flashback-logs may be purged from the recovery-area in favour of archived-redo-logs, rendering your configured flashback-retention-time (DB_FLASHBACK_RETENTION_TARGET) a value of theory. So far, sizing the file-system recovery-area is a task to be performed in a clear-sighted manner. The same is true then for undo-before-images (compare to logs) und the undo-tablespace (compare to area) to accomodate enough data to meet your configured undo-retention-time (UNDO_RETENTION) in UNDO_MANAGEMENT=AUTO mode, while in addition still support long running workload queries (not to overwrite old undo). This article discusses the usability of the (enterprise-manager) undo-advisor in sizing your undo-tablespace to always foster successful flashback queries up to the configured undo-retention-time (as opposed to the nasty surprise of getting an ora-01555, see below, which is also misleading here, imho, in suggesting that the undo-tablespace is to small now, as we know it from workload queries – nope, it has been to small before now, in the past, as regarded to flashback queries – also see : ora-01555 snapshot too old when running flashback query).