ORA-01552: cannot use system rollback segment

The Problem

When running a script into a refreshed database, I received the following error message:

ORA-01552: cannot use system rollback segment for non-system tablespace ‘string’

The Cause

The database was a clone of a physical standby database, and having recently “synced” to that clone to it matched the source database data exactly and required some additional post-clone steps to be run. Specifically, the database had not been taken out of physical standby mode.

This can be checked by looking at the DATABASE_ROLE in V$DATABASE; PHYSICAL_STANDBY will show in this case.

The Solution

The databse needed to be activated so that write operations could take place. This is done by running the following:

SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE
STARTUP MOUNT
ALTER DATABASE ACTIVATE PHYSICAL STANDBY DATABASE;
ALTER DATABASE OPEN READ WRITE;

This will open the database in read/write mode and you should no longer get the ORA-01552 error message.

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Category: Data Guard