ORA-44203: timeout waiting for lock on cursor

Been an interesting few weeks at work so thought i would share some of the more quirky and challenging thinks I've been working on.. here goes with the first blog entry

What do you do when this happens:

SQLPLUS>startup mount;
SQLPLUS> alter database open;  -- hang for an eternity and spew out this in the alert log

ORA-44203: timeout waiting for lock on cursor

Oh dear....

Raise an SR?

In this case we managed to fix it prompted by a tiny snippet generated in one of the (numerous) trace files. The snippet read 'SQL Tune Base Object Different' - which got me thinking as a few days earlier we'd imported some sql plan baselines from the prior 10g version of this database.

So we temporarily switched these off

ALTER SYSTEM SET optimizer_use_sql_plan_baselines=FALSE SCOPE=BOTH;

And it opened fine - on closer investigation it seemed we had included some SYS SQL in with the actual sql we were interested in - which seemed to send the startup routines crazy....

Thought I'd share as there were no other hits for this on the tinternet......