Apress.Expert.Oracle.Database.Architecture.9i.and.10g.Programming.Techniques.and.Solutions.Sep.2005

CHAPTER 3 ■ FILES 83
Trace Files Generated in Response to Internal Errors
I’d like to close this section with a discussion about those other kinds of trace files—the ones
we did not expect that were generated as a result of an ORA-00600 or some other internal
error. Is there anything we can do with them?
The short answer is that in general, they are not for you and me. They are useful to Oracle
Support. However, they can be useful when we are filing an iTAR with Oracle Support. That
point is crucial: if you are getting internal errors, then the only way they will ever be corrected
is if you file an iTAR. If you just ignore them, they will not get fixed by themselves, except by
accident.
For example, in Oracle 10g Release 1, if you create the following table and run the query,
you may well get an internal error (or not—it was filed as a bug and is corrected in later patch
releases):
ops$tkyte@ORA10G> create table t ( x int primary key );
Table created.
ops$tkyte@ORA10G> insert into t values ( 1 );
1 row created.
ops$tkyte@ORA10G> exec dbms_stats.gather_table_stats( user, 'T' );
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
ops$tkyte@ORA10G> select count(x) over ()
2 from t;
from t
*
ERROR at line 2:
ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [12410], [], [], [], [], [], [], []
Now, you are the DBA and all of a sudden this trace file pops up in the user dump destination.
Or you are the developer and your application raises an ORA-00600 error and you want
to find out what happened. There is a lot of information in that trace file (some 35,000 lines
more in fact), but in general it is not useful to you and me. We would generally just compress
the trace file and upload it as part of our iTAR processing.
However, there is some information in there that can help you track down the “who,”
“what,” and “where” of the error, and also help you find out if the problem is something others
have experienced—many times, the “why”—on http://metalink.oracle.com. A quick inspection
of the very top of the trace file will provide you with some useful information, such as
Dump file c:\oracle\admin\ora10g\udump\ora10g_ora_1256.trc
Sun Jan 02 14:21:29 2005
ORACLE V10.1.0.3.0 - Production vsnsta=0
vsnsql=13 vsnxtr=3
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition Release 10.1.0.3.0 - Production
With the Partitioning, OLAP and Data Mining options
Windows XP Version V5.1 Service Pack 2
CPU : 1 - type 586
Process Affinity: 0x00000000