ORA-01000: maximum open cursors exceeded

ORA-01000: maximum open cursors exceeded – It’s typical error encountered in Oracle database. It happens when too much cursors are opened on an oracle instance.

Maximum number of opened cursors for an instance is limited by parameter

open_cursors

usually for small databases it’s about 300 and can be very huge for bigger ones. To increase this parameter it requires to bounce database instance.

To find out who opened many cursors on instance use following query

SELECT SID, count(*) ses_cursors, sum(count(*)) OVER() total_cursors
FROM v$open_cursor
GROUP BY SID
ORDER BY 2 DESC;