One day this week, we got the following error showing up on our BI dashboards.
“ORA-00257: Archiver error. Connect AS SYSDBA only until resolved.”
This is an Oracle database error (which you may guess based on the “ORA”), and not an error directly from BI application.

If you get this error, it means that the database redo logs are filled up, and cannot be archived due to lack of space on the designated archive area or some other issue. In our case, the “some other issue” was caused by some issues with “commvault”, a software application used for data backup and recovery, among other things.

When this happens, if a user tries to connect to the database, such as the BI Application user in our case, the database will not allow the new connection. The only exception is SYSDBA users will be allowed to connect.

If you are not the database administrator (DBA), you will most likely work with your DBA (as we do) to get this error resolved.
After the issue that caused the problem is resolved and the redo logs are cleared, then the database, and therefore the BI application, will allow new connections as normal.

Thanks for reading and I hope you found this helpful.