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Sunday, January 23, 2005

Oh dear. Whilst browsing Don Burleson's site http://www.dba-oracle.com I came across this article on how to read the alert log from sql. Apart from being a short soundbite on an already well publicised use of external tables (see for example Jared Still's excellent article for dbazine on the same subject) the example published has some interesting features.

The table is defined with a rather short message column (80 characters) and a reject limit of 1000 records. As alert log lines can easily be longer than 80 characters this might be a poor choice. Fortunately in the version of Oracle that Don is apparently using 80 character lines can contain the string "ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [18095], [0xC0000000210D8BF8], [], [], [], [], []" which is itself rather longer than 80 characters.

Whilst this approach can, as Jared points out, be valuable it would pay to think about datatypes and reject policy if one is going to employ it.

Publishing results that are impossible and rather look as if they have just been made up is, to say the least, unhelpful as well.

1 Comments
1 Comments:
My God! You've exposed something truly important here! 80-characters, rather than 93! Niall, it's this sort of vigilence that keeps our crazy world on an even keel. You berk.
 
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