My database was terminated while in BACKUP MODE, do I need to recover?

If a database was terminated while one of its tablespaces was in BACKUP MODE (ALTER TABLESPACE xyz BEGIN BACKUP;), it will tell you that media recovery is required when you try to restart the database. The DBA is then required to recover the database and apply all archived logs to the database. However, from Oracle 7.2, one can simply take the individual datafiles out of backup mode and restart the database.

ALTER DATABASE DATAFILE '/path/filename' END BACKUP;

One can select from V$BACKUP to see which datafiles are in backup mode. This normally saves a significant amount of database down time.

See script end_backup2.sql in the script section of Blog.

From Oracle9i onwards, the following command can be used to take all of the datafiles out of hotbackup mode:

ALTER DATABASE END BACKUP;

This command must be issued when the database is mounted, but not yet opened.