How to retire a physical standby in Oracle 11.2 I have a production Oracle 11gR2 RAC database with a single node physical standby. Now it has become the time to retire the old standby and pass that role to a RAC on fresher hardware. 

We don't use Data Guard Broker.

I haven't been able to find much on this particular process, so I figured maybe there wasn't all that much to it. Apparently there is at least a tad more than I have been able to think of.

After stopping the log apply on the old standby, I attempted to simply clear the standby log destination and set a new destination for log shipping. Oracle then complains that the DB_UNQUE_NAME of the new physical standby is not a part of the current Data Guard configuration.  

SQL&gt; alter system set log_archive_dest_3='';

System altered.

SQL&gt; alter system checkpoint;

System altered.

SQL&gt; alter system set log_archive_dest_3='SERVICE=PDB10SBY LGWR ASYNC REGISTER VALID_FOR=(online_logfile,primary_role) REOPEN=60 DB_UNIQUE_NAME=PDB11SBY' scope=both sid='*';
alter system set log_archive_dest_3='SERVICE=PDB10SBY LGWR ASYNC REGISTER VALID_FOR=(online_logfile,primary_role) REOPEN=60 DB_UNIQUE_NAME=PDB10SBY' scope=both sid='*'
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-02097: parameter cannot be modified because specified value is invalid
ORA-16053: DB_UNIQUE_NAME PDB10SBY is not in the Data Guard Configuration


A quick query to v$dataguard_config confirms that there is an active configuration containing the DB_UNIQUE_NAME of the old standby database. 

SQL&gt; select * from
  2  v$dataguard_config;

DB_UNIQUE_NAME
------------------------------
PDB10
PDB10_STBY


So then the question is, what are the steps required to retire an existing Data Guard configuration so that a new physical standby database can be deployed?
The unique names of the databases in a Data Guard configuration are listed in the log_archive_config parameter in the following form:

log_archive_config='DG_CONFIG=(PDB10,PDB10_STBY)'


You can remove the old one and add the new one as:

alter system set log_archive_config='DG_CONFIG=(PDB10,PDB10SBY)';


After this, you can set log_archive_dest_N to the new standby.