ORA-4031 During Startup Nomount using RMAN without parameter file (PFILE) (Doc ID 1176443.1)

Symptoms

RMAN startup nomount failed with ORA-4031

Customer was testing RMAN backup/restore in Exadata.
Customer firstly backup the database to tape and then remove all the datafiles, spfile, controlfiles for testing.
Then during the recover, customer connected RMAN with nocatalog and try to "startup nomount", then ORA-4031 occured.



==================== Log ========================
oracle@hkfop011db01:/<PATH>
$ export ORACLE_SID=<SID_NAME>
oracle@test011db01:/<PATH>
$ rman target / nocatalog

Recovery Manager: Release 11.2.0.1.0 - Production on Thu Jul 8 20:45:10 2010
Copyright (c) 1982, 2009, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
connected to target database (not started)

RMAN> startup nomount

startup failed: ORA-01078: failure in processing system parameters
LRM-00109: could not open parameter file '/<PATH>/<INIT.ora>'

starting Oracle instance without parameter file for retrieval of spfile
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-03002: failure of startup command at 07/08/2010 20:45:19
RMAN-04014: startup failed: ORA-04031: unable to allocate 111264 bytes of shared memory ("shared pool","unknown object","sga heap(1,0)","KEWS sesstat values")

Cause

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