ORA-01516: nonexistent log file, data file, or temporary file .....................

I got this error while trying to resize (increase) one of my datafiles. I was baffled as the message is tell me the file is nonexistent and here I was staring at the file in the directory!

I ensured the said file was online and available, checked my syntax to see if I missed anything or if I had mixed up and upper case for a lower case and vice versa but I found nothing.

Big thanks to Vijay Kumar of http://vijaykumar-dbahub.blogspot.com. His post bailed me out!

I resized describing the datafile by its file#.

SQL> select FILE#,CREATION_TIME,name from v$datafile where name like 'full/path/to/datafile.dbf';

 SQL> alter database datafile (data file number) resize 20000M;

Database altered.

Root Cause Analysis still according to Vijay Kumar.

I created a backup controlfile to trace and then opened it with VI and alas! there was a space right in betweem the .dbf in the datafile name and the ' symbol. i.e.

'/oradata4/ORA/datafiles/ORA_data/XXX_XXX_X_XXXX.dbf  '

instead of

'/oradata4/ORA/datafiles/ORA_data/XXX_XXX_X_XXXX.dbf '


This was rectified by renaming the datafile.