Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Today while working i mistakenly deleted one DataFile which is of no use and was not part of any backup as well. I was happy and was good until i started recieving a weird error which is related with this old Datafile which i’ve already deleted from my Database Box and it not allowing me to start the DB instance and throwing errors:

[oracle@localhost ~]$ sqlplus / as sysdba

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 – Production on Tue Sep 11 09:57:30 2012

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle.  All rights reserved.
Connected to:
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.2.0.1.0 – Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options

ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01157: cannot identify/lock data file 11 – see DBWR trace file
ORA-01110: data file 11: ‘/u01/appwiz.dbf’
So it clearly says that it’s all because of that recent deletion of Data File 11 ‘Appwiz.dbf’ which triggered this problem.
Resolution: I’ve offline deleted that datafile (11) and tried starting the instance and finally

SQL> alter database datafile 11 offline drop;
Database altered.

SQL> alter database open;
Database altered.

SQL> select status from v$instance;

STATUS
————
OPEN