Oracle Internal Errors

From: Jeff Laing <jeff.laing_at_spatialinfo.com>
Date: Tue, 09 Feb 1999 11:34:28 +1100
Message-ID: <36BF8294.1C80FFC8@spatialinfo.com>

Recently, we have experienced a rather disturbing Oracle failure.

In short, we issue the following SQL:

update some_table set journal = 21 where id_1 = 'LE005527' and connection = 'LEEN'

       *
ERROR at line 1:

and get this error:

ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [13013], [5001], [3], [1275104053], [17], [1275103793], [], []

A support call from Oracle tells us that this indicates an index / data mismatch; we dropped the index and rebuilt it and the failing SQL then worked.

The problem, however, is that this condition keeps coming back. In fact, at one point, a program we had that applied a number of updates to the table in question would *almost* always cause the condition to recur; we cannot afford to drop the indices during this program's operation since we have other concurrent users of the database who need the indices in place.

In my opinion, it should be impossible for any user program to cause Oracle to corrupt its indices; clearly, however, I must be wrong.

Does anyone have any experience with this sort of problem? Are there any well-known (or not so well-known) gotcha's with using PRO*C in a bad way that causes Oracle to "lose its mind" ?

For the record, we have a number of different indices on the table (to make certain queries reasonably responsive) and we are definitely updating various columns (although not all) used in the indices.

Oh, and its Oracle 7.3.2.2.0 on HP/UX 10.2 if that makes a difference

Jeff Laing <jeffl_at_spatialinfo.com>

---

A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.

• J Gall. "Systemantics: How systems work and how they fail"

Received on Mon Feb 08 1999 - 18:34:28 CST