An interesting case we just got while migrating a data to the different database where we got the following error:

ORA-39083: Object type REF_CONSTRAINT failed to create with error:

ORA-02298: cannot enable name – parent keys not found

The issue was between 2 tables. It couldn’t enable the foreign key constraint by throwing error that “parent key not found”. The migration was from production database where the foreign key constraint was enabled and it is not possible to have a data in the child table without parent rows.

After quering both tables I found the missing rows, deleted them from the child table and run the query to enable the constraint again – and it succeeded. The reason was because the first table that was exported was the primary table. Then a few rows were added to both primary and child tables (in the production database). Then child table was exported with having those rows which are missing from the primary table (because it was exported firstly)

The solution was to use FLASHBACK_SCN or FLASHBACK_TIME parameter while exporing the data and get all rows that are consistent as of this SCN or TIME

There are a lot of explanation and different solutions for the error “ORA-00304: requested INSTANCE_NUMBER is busy”. But today, in my case while I was tyring to shutdown one of the cluster nodes, it hanged. There were no more information related with the hang in the log and trace files, so I went with shut abort and startup and got the following message:

SQL> startup

ORA-00304: requested INSTANCE_NUMBER is busy

SQL>

The second node of the RAC database was up and running. And the instance_number was set to 2. After a little investigation, I found out that there was one process related with the database running on OS (even the database was closed) I killed that session and started the first node and it opened successfully