ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

Problem

SQL> startup nomount pfile=/tmp/initpriman.ora.standby.tmp
ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system

Cause

ORA-00845 occurs when shared memory is not mapped to /dev/shm or /dev/shm has not sufficient memory to hold MEMORY_TARGET.

1) check current memory_target setting

[oracle@host01 dbs]$ more initpriman.ora |grep -i memory_target
*.memory_target=629145600

if spfile is used

[oracle@host01 dbs]$strings spfilepriman.ora |grep -i memory_target
*.memory_target=629145600

2) current available shared memory

[oracle@host01 dbs]$ df -k
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00   36533824  21684528  12963500  63% /
/dev/sda1               101086     19374     76493  21% /boot
tmpfs                  1029756    717532    312224  70% /dev/shm
/dev/sdf1              2062336    319160   1743176  16% /ocfs2/clusterware

As current available shared memory 312M is less than required memory_target 600M, ORA-00845 raises.

Solution

Add more shared memory to /dev/shm

$> mount -t tmpfs tmpfs -o size=2g /dev/shm

Modify this line in /etc/fstab to make change persistent across reboot.

tmpfs                   /dev/shm                tmpfs   size=2g        0 0