Corruption detection, prevention, and automatic repair with Oracle Data Guard

Corruption in an Oracle database block means that a block doesn't contain the data that the database expects to find. This can be caused by various failures in the hardware environment, including disks, disk controllers, memory or network components or software errors in the operating system, firmware, the volume manager, and the Oracle database software itself.

Oracle offers some initialization parameters to control the level of corruption prevention and detection. Of course, a higher level brings performance issues with it. In a Data Guard configuration, using the standby database for corruption detection and prevention will bring higher data protection and availability with less performance effect on the primary database.

Let's first start with learning the three types of block corruption in Oracle databases.

• Physical block corruption: In a physically corrupted database block, the block header may be corrupted...