How to delete the archive logs in Oracle

Archive logs keep accumulating and we need to put things in place to delete them on a regular basis. We should not be deleting the archivelog from the filesystem directly as the Oracle Database is not aware of that and space is not released in the Flash recovery area

Let’s see a few commands to delete the archive logs

How to delete the archivelog after the backup is done

BACKUP  ARCHIVELOG delete ALL INPUT;

This will delete the archivelog once the backup is done on the channel defined

You can use this together with the database also

BACKUP DATABASE PLUS ARCHIVELOG delete ALL INPUT;

How to delete the archive logs which are backed off

delete archivelog UNTIL TIME = 'SYSDATE-1.5' backed up 1 times to sbt_tape;

You can change the timing accordingly. If you are backing up to Disk only, then you can specify the below command

delete archivelog UNTIL TIME = 'SYSDATE-1.5' backed up 1 times to disk;

This command will ask for the Prompt to delete the archivelog, if you want to delete without any prompt, use the below command

delete noprompt archivelog UNTIL TIME = 'SYSDATE-1.5' backed up 1 times to disk;

Suppose you want to delete the archivelog older than 1 hour, you can use the below command

delete archivelog UNTIL TIME = 'SYSDATE-1/24' backed up 1 times to disk;

How to delete the archive logs

We can delete the archive logs whether backed up or not use using the below command

delete archivelog UNTIL TIME = 'SYSDATE-1/24' ;

How to delete the expired archive logs

Suppose you manually deleted the archive log from FRA, then the below steps can be done to remove those from the FRA dictionary

rman target /
list expired archivelog all;
crosscheck archivelog all;
list expired archivelog all;
delete expired archivelog all;

How to delete the archive logs from a particular archive dest

Suppose you are using two archive locations to store the archive logs, then you can use the below command to delete it

delete archivelog LIKE '%arc_dest_1%' UNTIL TIME = 'SYSDATE-1/24' ;

I hope you like this post on archivelog deletion.

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