Non-Technical: Ora-1652 Type Errors and Novice DBA's

Questions popup about this error with some regularity and trigger responses on how to fix the problem. Often the person citing the problem discovers the error when reviewing the alert_log. The how-to-fix responses never include the harder part of the solution: a transaction has failed; someone needs to be alerted. This is especially true for batch jobs. You cannot assume the application handled the error correctly or that anyone else is aware that the error occurred.

In my 17 or so years as a DBA I've had less than a handful of such problems. I have always hand held them thus: the first person I contact is the programmer responsible for the application; if that person cannot answer the "What if ...?" question or gives an unsatisfactory answer, the owner of the data is alerted, and also my boss. When someone asked, "How it could of possibly have happened, I answered, "It should not have." and explain that the programmer is going to build safegaurds against such failures into the program.

This part of the job isn't covered in any of the books, and I doubt it is tested on the OCP exams.

Ian MacGregor
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
ian_at_slac.stanford.edu Received on Tue Aug 15 2000 - 16:35:32 CDT