Fred's Blog

I’ve got a script that runs through the alert logs for all the Oracle databases I manage every 10 minutes or so and sends me a text message containing the error number if it finds an error. Sometimes, when the errors are of the more exotic variety, I am left scratching my head– Do I need to leap into the batmobile and race to the nearest terminal to avert the latest crisis? Or can I continue sunning myself on the roof of my Barcelona penthouse? It is always a dilemma.

I could look up the error on one of the scads of websites out there that list Oracle error messages using my Treo’s (painfully slow) Internet connection, but that is, as I believe I said, painfully slow.

Makes me wish there was a lightweight web page out there, without images or advertising, where I could look up the error and get a quick synopsis of it.

Well now, thanks to me, there is such a web page: http://phlonx.com/oerr

It contains all the currently-documented ORA, PLS, and RMAN errors. I could add more if I find I need to add them or if someone requests it.

One nice feature of this page is that it accepts alphabetic input from a Treo keyboard. For instance, to look up ORA-16005 you don’t have to toggle your keyboard to numeric input, you can just type eg00f and it gets automatically translated.

Ironically, the Oracle error messages reside in a MySQL database. Massaging the raw data into valid INSERT statements was a bit of a chore in the beginning because I was using as source material a file that comes installed with every (Unix, seems to be lacking from Windows) Oracle installation: $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/mesg/oraus.msg. This file is rather sloppily maintained, making it difficult to parse out the different fields in a consistent way. Took me a lot of trial and error.

This file only contains the ORA- errors, so for the others I had to turn to the official Oracle documentation itself: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14219/toc.htm …and reformatting the raw data in those pages was a breeze using Textpad and regular expressions. This technique missed the fields that span multiple lines, but I didn’t worry about that since those are few and could be handled manually.