How to Resolve ORA-20016: Unable to get the lock : get_pending_activity : 1

ORA-20016

Tried to do a datapatch (SQL apply) against a database, but it failed with ORA-20016: Unable to get the lock.

C:\Users\Administrator>datapatch -verbose
...
Error: prereq checks failed!
verify_queryable_inventory returned ORA-20016: Unable to get the lock : get_pending_activity : 1
Prereq check failed, exiting without installing any patches.
...

We suspected that the database is stuck at somewhere. So we decide to restart the database service.

Solution

To restart a database service, open services.msc directly, right click on the service, then choose "Restart".

For RAC databases in Linux, you should restart the database on all nodes.

[oracle@primary01 ~]$ srvctl stop database -d orclcdb
[oracle@primary01 ~]$ srvctl start database -d orclcdb

Then try to datapatch again.

C:\Users\Administrator>datapatch -verbose
...

We're good.