Can someone explain ORA-29861 error in plain english and its possible cause?

Question

I have an application implemented in Grails framework using underlying Hibernate. After it runs for a while, I got an Oracle DB error and resolved it by rebuilding the offending index. I wonder if anyone can propose the possible cause(s) and ways to prevent it from happening.

Caused by: org.springframework.jdbc.UncategorizedSQLException:

Hibernate operation: Could not execute JDBC batch update; uncategorized SQLException for SQL [update RSS_ITEM set guid=?, pubdate=?, link=?, rss_source_id=?, title=?, description=?, rating_raw=?, rating_tuned=?, date_created=?, date_locked=? where RSS_ITEM_ID=?]; SQL state [99999]; error code [29861]; ORA-29861: domain index is marked LOADING/FAILED/UNUSABLE

; nested exception is java.sql.BatchUpdateException: ORA-29861: domain index is marked LOADING/FAILED/UNUSABLE

Answer 1

To locate broken index use:

select index_name,index_type,status,domidx_status,domidx_opstatus from user_indexes where index_type like '%DOMAIN%' and (domidx_status <> 'VALID' or domidx_opstatus <> 'VALID'); 

To rebuild the index use:

alter index INDEX_NAME rebuild;