For DBAs running production databases on professional grade storage systems, corruptions are rare. Indeed EMC arrays include additional technology to actively prevent silent data corruption and bit rot.
However corruption does still occur for a number of different reasons, including hardware failure, software error and sometimes user error. When it does occur, knowing how to properly identify the affected objects, and how in some cases to rescue usable data, can be important time savers to the production Oracle DBA.
In the following post we look at a step by step approach to isolating corruption, verifying it, and then rescuing what data we can. The following was tested on Oracle 10.2.0.2 on a Windows platform.
the gruffdba 