More Fun With Databases

Today's entry is brought to you by the number 01114 and the letters O,R and A.

That's right, it's "ORA-01114: IO error writing block to file 201"

I started seeing this one late this afternoon while testing one of the products in our BI review and now, at 7:30 in the evening, I have the problem fixed. For some reason the TEMP tablspace in Oracle is maxed out at 4GB. But the real problem was that it must have gotten locked at some point and wouldn't allow any large queries to go through. A quick reboot of the server cleared the TEMP files and released the locks, so finally the BI tools are able to figure out how much $$$ in sales we've made off specific categories of widgets.

In case you're curious, here's the results from the horse's mouth:

SUM(ORDERS.TOTAL) CATEGORY
----------------- ------------
       14103848.9 CAFFEINE
       12289291.3 IM
       13287830.4 LASER
       16861087.5 LIGHT
        9980358.7 MP3
       11493839.8 ROBOTS
       11513981.1 SMART CARD
       22925430.2 STORAGE
       12541190.6 VOICE
       12713046.1 WATCHES
         18839119 WIRELESS