Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

If you have the ASM configured in your environment, it’s always hard to remember the ASM file names unless you have aliased the entires. But this is what i discovered while working on one of my Test machine which has the ASM Configured. I found filenames and extensions fully qualified but not just another techical opaques.

These are some of the datafiles which are part of my ASM and available on the diskgroup.

SQL> select name from v$datafile;

NAME
——————————————————————————–
+TESTDB_DATA1/orcl/datafile/tesla.261.795016577
+TESTDB_DATA1/orcl/datafile/example12.256.794584325
+TESTDB_DATA1/orcl/datafile/dixy.257.794593881
+TESTDB_DATA1/orcl/datafile/users1111.258.794825249
+TESTDB_DATA1/orcl/datafile/text.259.794825753
+TESTDB_DATA1/orcl/datafile/test12345.260.794840557

eg:
Let’s dissect one of the file
+TESTDB_DATA1/orcl/datafile/dixy.257.794593881
Here if watch carefully:
+TESTDB_DATA1: DiskGroup Name (+ indicates the root of the ASM)
orcl: Name of the client database installed.
datafile: The File Type
dixy: Name of the Data File.
257: Unique File Number
794593881: Database Incarnation Number.

To conform you can also crosscheck and validate using v$database_incarnation.