Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Hi Guys,

Today’s one is a quick one and is about an old package (I guess its there since 8i days), but lesser known and underutilized feature at the same time.
Recently I was working on an OEM task where I have to edit the metric collection regular expressions to make it as per requirements. The next question was asked – ‘Lets wait till the time that specific incident happens in the database to see if it triggers the alert or not ….‘ Really ? Do we have to wait that long ?

No, in order to test that change, you don’t even have to adopt any crude method of editing the alert log file manually and write the error message over there or use UTL_FILE. There is an inbuilt package called dbms_system that you can use to handle such cases and write your custom messages to the alert log file. There are few other options/routines available that you can do with the package but this one is about a special subprogram called ‘ksdwrt‘.

dbms_system.ksdwrt(dest IN BINARY_INTEGER,tst IN VARCHAR2);

Here is the syntax:
execute sys.dbms_system.ksdwrt(,to_char(sysdate)|| ‘ — ‘);
where the argument values can be
1 to write to trace file
2 to write to alert log file
3 to write both trace and alert logfile.

Example:
exec dbms_system.ksdwrt(3,'ORA-04031: This is a test error message, please ignore');

Hope It Helped!
Prashant Dixit