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The 40 Most Common Oracle Errors

oracle errors

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Salai Sundar Ramanujulu
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88 views4 pages

The 40 Most Common Oracle Errors

oracle errors

Uploaded by

Salai Sundar Ramanujulu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The 40 Most Common Oracle Errors

David Njoku on 12 March 2012 with 20 comments


I have been in this industry long enough to remember the bad old days, when every developer
and DBA had a pile of dusty Oracle user guides on their desks and, every time their database or
application coughed up an error, would thumb through the books with mounting desperation.
Fortunately, the times have moved on and we now all outsource our memories to Google and
Bing and Baidu. Our desks are clear, but our need for external help whenever we are ambushed
by unexpected errors is just as strong.
Using tools Google have made available, I have put together a list of the ORA messages we
collectively searched for the most in the first month of 2012. These messages (see a Billboardstyle Top 40 Chart at the bottom of this article) are a mix of those generic errors that can mean
pretty much anything, the error messages we see most rarely, and those common error numbers
that we never seem able to memorise.

ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier


specified (#1)
Coming in at number 1, and googled more than twice as often as any other error message, this
error is, almost appropriately, often the very first one you get on trying to establish a connection
to your database. Simply put, it means that you have named the database you wish to be
connected to and Oracle doesnt know who the heck youre talking about.
This error is often caused by typos, maybe in your connection string, but possibly in your
tnsnames.ora file. It is also possible that the tnsnames.ora file is not accessible or does not even
exist. If it does, ensure that it contains the service name you are using; also go over it with a fine
toothcomb to make sure it doesnt have any unpaired parentheses or such.

ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [%s], [%s],


[%s], [%s], [%s] (#2)
Coming in at number 2 is a generic error; it means something serious has gone wrong and you
are going to need to roll up your sleeves, dig in, and find out what. But you are not without clues.
Your alert.log file will contain the path to your trace file. You will want to look in it, as a record
is written to the trace file every time an ORA-00600 error occurs. Take the information you get
from your trace file and the first argument in the square brackets (the internal message number),
and head over to My Oracle Support (Metalink). There you will find a handy ORA-0600 lookup

tool (Note 153788.1) that will direct you to additional information that will help you solve your
problem.

ORA-1722: Invalid Number (#3)


You get this error when your SQL tries to convert a non-numeric string into a number. This
conversion might be explicit to_number(I am looking for trouble) or implicit.
This error often arises when you have a table with a varchar2 column in which you store nothing
but numbers. You know that this is bad practice, but you know you will get away with it as long
as you strictly store nothing but numbers in the column and all your procedures treat the contents
of the column as numeric. But then, one day, you hire a new developer and, seeing that the
column is varchar2, he inserts a two instead of 2 into it. And suddenly all the procedures
and functions that reference this column clutch their chests and die.

ORA-03113: end-of-file on communication channel (#5)


This error pretty much means that your connection has clutched its chest and died. For some
reason, your client machine and the database server are acting like an old married couple and
have stopped talking to each other. That reason could be one of a rather long list: has your server
crashed? has someone pulled out your network cable? was your process killed at the O/S level?
is your Windows log full? or maybe there is an Oracle internal error?
My advice is this: do not overlook the obvious. This error is sometimes caused by the simplest of
things. If, however, it is caused by an Oracle internal error, look to your alert log for further
information.

ORA-01000: maximum open cursors exceeded (#23)


You get this error when a user of a host program attempts to open more cursors than they are
allowed. The number of cursors allowed is dictated by the OPEN_CURSORS initialization
parameter, and this quota can be eaten up by both implicit and explicit cursors. If you run into
this error, there is a possibility that there is a bug in your application. Perhaps youve got an open
cursor statement within a loop and you do not have a matching close cursor, and as a result your
code is bleeding cursors all over the place.
However, it is possible that the OPEN_CURSORS number is just too low for the needs of your
application and has to be upped. The default value is 50; however, the only factor limiting how
high this number can go 300, 1000, 2000 even is what the operating system can take.
However, it may be unwise to choose to change the OPEN_CURSORS parameter too steeply,
rather than examine your code for leaks. Thatll be like thinking you can save yourself from
drowning by drinking the sea.

Conclusion

I am not going to be able to analyse all of the Top 40 error messages given the constraints of
space. Please inspect the list below (its interesting to see what we all search for the most
anyway) and if you see an error that you feel you can provide succinct advice for, please add it to
the comments section.

Top 40 Most Searched For Oracle Errors


Position

Error

Global Monthly Searches*

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34

ORA-12154
ORA-00600
ORA-01722
ORA-12560
ORA-03113
ORA-00604
ORA-00936
ORA-01017
ORA-01555
ORA-04031
ORA-00257
ORA-27101
ORA-00911
ORA-00933
ORA-01403
ORA-01422
ORA-04030
ORA-00932
ORA-01031
ORA-20000
ORA-12560
ORA-06508
ORA-01000
ORA-12505
ORA-20001
ORA-12519
ORA-01008
ORA-00054
ORA-01830
ORA-00907
ORA-00984
ORA-01461
ORA-01110
ORA-00001

101,500
40,500
27,100
22,200
18,100
14,800
12,100
12,100
12,100
12,100
12,100
12,100
12,100
9,900
9,900
9,900
9,900
9,900
8,100
8,100
8,100
8,100
6,600
6,600
6,600
6,600
6,600
6,600
6,600
6,600
6,600
5,400
5,400
5,400

35
36
37
38
39
40

ORA-02010
ORA-12537
ORA-03135
ORA-01034
ORA-00918
ORA-04063

5,400
5,400
5,400
5,400
5,400
5,400

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