Oracle database’s documentation available at Tahiti is a really vast and impressive resource of knowledge. There is almost everything, that’s usable to a dba in his daily work, available over it and in a very elaborated manner. Out of all the books, one book, which I believe must have been accessed by many is the Error Message guide 🙂 . Now, it’s really quick and easy to navigate the error guide, search for the error number, it’s cause and then the action required to solve it from the online guide but at times, you don’t have the access to the online documentation. Okay, to be honest, that’s not a big deal still because you can download the documentation and can keep it with you. But still, doing that is again an additional task which, to be honest, some dba’s would care to do and some(most IMHO) won’t. That demands for something which should be able to give the error description without the usage of both online and offline documentation. Fortunately, there is a solution for almost everything when it comes to computers :-) and for the mentioned trouble, Oracle supplies a utility OERR. This is an offline tool which can be used very easily to find the error description that you are getting. But there is just one trouble, this tool is NOT there for Windows, well it was till today 😉 .
My friend John Barrenechea has managed to put together the OERR for Windows and given the honor to me to use it before making it available to all. And I can say with full confidence that it works like a charm. I am honored that he has chosen me to make this tool available to Oracle community via my blog. So without further a due, here is the download link . There is a very elaborated readme file provided to explain the usage and the mechanism used to create it. There are few features added, or you can say enhanced, in this version of OERR compared to it’s sibling available over Unix platforms. I encourage you all to download it, use and post the feedback of yours over here in the comments section and I shall pass them on to John. Happy troubleshooting 🙂 .
Update: There was a bug in the previous version of OERR found by John related to the prompt mode. It has been rectified and the new, updated version is available for download. Please check and post feedback.
Awesome work John !
I too have been discussing it with few of my programmer friends but all those discussions died a childhood death 😛
Cheers !
PS: Time to start a blog, may be 😉
Looks like it is a very good piece of work however it needs some improvement
It works fine for error messages but when it comes to trace events its not doing well 🙂
with linux
[oracle@xxxxxx mesg]$ oerr ora 10046
10046, 00000, “enable SQL statement timing”
// *Cause:
// *Action:
with oerr for windows
>> [ORA] { error | q }: ORA 10046
OERR-0001: requested combination not found.
Cause : Either this combination is invalid or this error has not been
Action: Check that the and are correct. If they
with Tanels oerr.sql
COSKANDBA@CLONE1> @oerr 10046
ORA-10046: enable SQL statement timing
Tanels SQL
set serverout on size 1000000 feedback off
prompt
exec dbms_output.put_line(sqlerrm(-&1))
prompt
@Amardeep: Thank you for the kind words 🙂
@Coskan:
Correct me if I am wrong, I believe you are using Dion Cho’s PL/SQL implementation of oerr. He got the messages from a file named ORAUS.MSG
I could not find this file in my installation of Oracle. I did find a lot of .msb file, which after I expanded them, resulted in a single line message (no cause and no corrective action were present). Because they lacked the cause and corrective action, I decided not to use them and, use the Oracle documentation (.htm) files instead.
If there is a more complete source than the .htm documetation files, I would be most interested in using that as the source for a new – and more complete – oerrdb.odb.
@Coskan,
I forgot to mention in my message above that, the reason it doesn’t do so well with trace events is because those messages are not included in the standard .htm documentation files.
If there is a source for those messages (preferably .htm files since I already wrote a parser for those), I would add them to oerrdb.odb.
Thank you for pointing those messages as missing. Good to know.
John.
@Coskan,
The version of Oerr you got is the uncorrected one. I can tell because Oerr’s own error messages are truncated to one line, which is the bug related to the addition of prompt mode, which I corrected in the current version.
Not a terrible bug but, still visually annoying (to a perfectionist like me 😉 )
@John
The file I am using is from linux default installation. Unfortunately I don’t have any windows installation at the moment to check the file content but it might be the reason maybe Oracle forgot to put them in the windows homes.
Overall I think you did a very good job. thanks for sharing
@Coskan,
My pleasure to share. I hope it will be useful to many.
I found an oraus.msg which had the messages you mentioned are missing. I extended the html parser to read and merge oraus. The result is a new oerrdb.odb that includes the messages you mentioned (4100+ new messages).
The downside is that those messages do not have a “cause” and “action”. Because of this, Oerr shows “N/A” for both fields but at least it shows the text.
Enjoy!
Pretty useful discussion! hi John, you still there. I wanna learning something about Oracle database’s documentation. Hopefully you’ll publish soon. 🙂