RE: Alert Log file.

Stephen,

I would have renamed it. And hid. :)

Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: stephen booth [mailto:stephenbooth.uk_at_gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2005 1:44 PM To: Jared Still
Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: Alert Log file.

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 09:02:55 -0800, Jared Still <jkstill_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 14:39:17 +0000, stephen booth
> <stephenbooth.uk_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> > Nearly forgot. Check the size of your alert log, Windows has a
> > maximum size for files. It's unlikely that you'd hit that but it's
> > possible. It's a good idea to periodically archive off your alert
>
> That would have to be an extremely large alert log.
>
> --
> Jared Still
> Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist
>

You should see some of the sites I've visited. Where I work right now my employer has a number of systems outsourced to an FM supplier. Their lead DBA has a rule of you never archive off the alert log. Some of those systems have been in for 7 years or more. Every single message since someone typed 'create database...' is in the alert log. On some of the older systems you couldn't fit the whole alert log in memory, on one the alert log is bigger than the database.

This all came to light when we had a problem on one system (connections kept dropping and PMON had to clean them up) and I wanted to look at the alert log to see how often it was occuring. I forget what the message was but there was a mesage that appeared in the alert log when it happened. It took 5 minutes for vi to open the file. At first I thought vi had crashed but he assured me that it always took a while. In the end I just used tail to put the last 1000 lines into another file.

I'd love to see the reaction when he has to upload one of his alert logs to Oracle Support.

Stephen

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