Re: Undocumented features

In article <3g6l6g$quo_at_dcsun4.us.oracle.com>, rmanalac_at_oracle.com (Roderick Manalac) says:
>
>lsd_at_quay.ie (Liam Dwan) writes:
>|> Are you saying that my Oracle DB contains hidden logic bombs and all that
>|> it requires is for the office monkey to come up with the right combination
>|> of key strokes and then WIPEOUT. Sounds like you're playing the company
>|> secret game a bit too seriously.
>
>That would be a great exaggeration. That is not to say that there are not
>a set of events and actions that one can do to damage a key block in the
>database. In general, you are at a much higher risk of someone accidently
>doing dropping an important table, overwriting a datafile, or issuing a
>bogus mass update than you are of someone setting a set of events and
>undocumented init.ora parameters to the right values and performing some
>dba activities that could potentially do major damage to a database.
>Operative phrase being DBA intervention.
>
>Still, it is in general unwise to try to take advantage of things that are
>unsupported, undocumented, subject to change without notice, not well
>understood, etc... That would be true of any piece of software or hardware
>not just Oracle.
>
>Roderick Manalac
>Oracle Corporation

Just to tease those scratching their heads, what about the following events?

xxxxx, skip corrupted blocks on _table_scans_
xxxxx, simulate ^C (for testing purposes)
xxxxx, print trace of PMON actions to trace file
xxxxx, Turn on scgcmn tracing. (VMS ONLY)
xxxxx, turn on tracing for dispatchers
xxxxx, turn on tracing for multi-stated servers
xxxxx, turn on traces for SMON
xxxxx, Alter access violation exception handler

There are over 100s of these events. For heaven's sake don't try these on your production systems or even your own development system and then find out that you have blown your database and call support. You are on your own here if you want to muck around with undocummented features.

ta
tony

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