ORA-00838

Ran into an interesting issue the other day that took me a while to fix. I was trying to start a non-production database and received this error:

ORA-00838: Specified value of MEMORY_TARGET is too small, needs to be at least 1428M
ORA-01078: failure in processing system parameters

For starters, the Oracle documentation for my version says that the minimum value for MEMORY_TARGET is 512MB but the above error is telling me that I need to be using a larger value. So the next logical step is to get help for this error message.

[oracle@host ~]$ oerr ora 838
00838, 00000, "Specified value of MEMORY_TARGET is too small, needs to be at least %sM"
// *Cause: The specified value of MEMORY_TARGET was less than the sum of the
// specified values for SGA_TARGET and PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET.
// *Action: Set MEMORY_TARGET to at least the recommended value.

Well thats interesting. Here is my PFILE contents.

*.audit_file_dest='/u01/app/oracle/admin/orcl/adump'
*.audit_trail='DB_EXTENDED'
*.compatible='11.2.0.0.0'
*.control_files='/u01/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/data01/control01.ctl','/u01/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/data02/control02.ctl','/u01/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/data03/control03.ctl'
*.db_block_size=8192
*.db_domain='naucom.com'
*.db_files=1100
*.db_name='orcl'
*.db_recovery_file_dest_size=214748364800
*.db_recovery_file_dest='/archivelog'
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*.dispatchers='(PROTOCOL=TCP) (SERVICE=orclXDB)'
*.event=''
*.job_queue_processes=10
*.memory_target=1048576000
*.open_cursors=300
*.processes=1600
*.remote_login_passwordfile='EXCLUSIVE'
*.sec_case_sensitive_logon=FALSE
*.undo_tablespace='UNDOTBS4'

 

Notice that I am not specifying SGA_TARGET or PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET. So the error message help was of no help here. After working the problem, I discovered that someone had changed my parameter file.

*.processes=1600

This is a small non-production database. My MEMORY_TARGET is only 1GB. So why is PROCESSES set to such a large value? When I returned this to a much smaller value of 600, the instance had no problems starting up. The number of processes derives the number of sessions, which necessitates a higher SGA. The initial error message was correctly but provided no clues as to why the problem existed.