Problem Diagnosis - Expert Oracle RAC Performance Diagnostics and Tuning - page 633

Before notifying Oracle of the error message, as DBAs, the first step is to determine if others have encountered
this error. Such information could be obtained from metalink. Oracle has provided an ORA-600 error lookup utility that
will help in obtaining this.
Figure 18-6 , shown earlier in this chapter, is an input screen for the ORA-600 argument lookup. On selecting the
Oracle version and providing the first argument, the lookup will search through metalink and provide any information
that is available on the specific error argument. Based on the message, the fix may already be explained.
In certain cases, depending on the type of error and occurrence of the message, information pertaining to the
argument may not be available. In this case, a technical assistance request (TAR) or a service request (SR) is opened
with Oracle Support.
ORA-7445: exception encountered core dump [...][...]
ORA-7445 is also a critical error; however, the criticality is not grouped at the same level as the ORA-600 errors. The
ORA-7445 error indicates that the process may have performed an illegal operation and hence was terminated by the
operating system.
Like the ORA-600 error, ORA-7445 also reports arguments to the error message. Unlike the ORA-600 error
argument, the ORA-7445 argument is alphanumeric rather than numeric and normally reflects an Oracle-related
internal function call. The Oracle error lookup tool 3 (shown previously in Figure 18-6 ) is a good starting point to look
at ORA-7445 errors.
DBA Support Utilities
In the preceding section, when critical errors are encountered and an SR is opened with Oracle support, to help, the
Oracle support staff—to better understand the environment and diagnose the issues—would like to understand the
current state of the environment: for example, the patches applied, the current version levels, any third-party utilities/
applications configured, and so forth. In this section, we discuss some of these utilities.
Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA)
RDA is a command line utility to gather diagnostic information about an Oracle environment. The scripts are
focused to collect information that will aid in problem diagnosis; however, the output is also very useful to see the
comprehensive view of an environment.
When reporting critical errors to Oracle Support, it is encouraged that the RDA be used because it gives a
comprehensive picture of the environment. This can greatly reduce TAR resolution time by minimizing the number of
requests from Oracle Support Services for more information. RDA does not modify your system in any way; it merely
collects data useful for Oracle Support Services.
Because the operation of these scripts is system specific, Oracle provides different sets of scripts and
downloadable scripts for the various operating systems.
When installing RDA for gathering information from a RAC implementation, depending on whether Oracle
and the operating system files are installed individually for each node, it is good to download and configure RDA
on all instances. If Oracle and the operating systems files are shared among all instances (e.g., in HP Tru64), only
one installation of RDA is required. My Oracle support (MOS) 314422.1 gives details on how to download, install,
configure, and collect required information.
3 Troubleshoot on ORA-600 or ORA-7445 error using lookup tool—Metalink Note: 153788.1.