my recent reads..

Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters; From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima
Power Sources and Supplies: World Class Designs
Red Storm Rising
Locked On
Analog Circuits Cookbook
The Teeth Of The Tiger
Sharpe's Gold
Without Remorse
Practical Oscillator Handbook
Red Rabbit

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Find and tail the Oracle alert log

"Where's the alert log?" .. usually the first thing you want to know when looking at a new database.

Oracle's Grid Control solves this problem very well with it's web interface. But not always available.

Or in my case recently, where I had 6 databases setup on a single machine for various testing scenarios, I was getting tired of cd'ing all over the place, forgetting paths, or ending up with too many windows open for my own good. Getting well sick of this, I did a quick hunt for scripts to help but surprisingly didn't find much. So diving in, I created oraAlertLog.sh and now I'm happy;)

This script is for running on the database server. The Oracle environment must be set, and - at least for the first call - the database must be available so that the "background_dump_dest" parameter can be obtained. The script will cache the alert log location so that it will still work if the database happens to be down.

After getting this running I thought "duh!", should have been in perl so it would be possible to run on any platform supported by Oracle. Here's a version in Perl: oraAlertLog.pl. It requires Perl with DBI and DBD::Oracle .. the Perl distribution included with Oracle Database is fine for this (you just need to make sure the environment is properly configured).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi

both links are dead

Unknown said...

sorry, dns issues. should be fixed now