Hi,

I have a standby database from which I am taking backups, and I am wanting to sync the backup information to a Recovery Catalog. Sadly, I am getting a sort error problem (ORA-01220: file based sort illegal before database is open).

Now, I imagined this was due to low sort_area_[retained]_size, and promptly looked (I inherited some databases recently). Sure enough, the sort/retained was pretty low at 100,000. I then proceeded to cancel recovery, shut instance, restart with successively larger values of sort. (This is 9.2.0.4 version btw).

Everytime I try a resync, it almost immediately returns this 01220 error, even with sort_area_size and the retained variant set at 1GB.

I can't believe it is exhausting this, and am loathe to try increasing it still further.

Anyone encountered this problem before, have any suggestions?

Best regards,

- Tony.