ADR Command Interpreter – ADRCI
The ADR Command Interpreter (ADRCI) is a utility that enables you to investigate problems, view health check reports, and package for upload and upload first-failure diagnostic data to Oracle Support. This is all done within a new command-line environment that Oracle delivers with Oracle 11g called ADRCI – ADR Command Interpreter. ADRCI provides you with the ability to view the names of the trace files in the ADR and to view the alert logs with XML tags stripped out and without content filtering.
ADR Structure, Location and Overview of the ADR Contents
ADR – Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR), is a directory structure that resides on your filesystems outside of the Oracle Database, hence, it can be viewed while the Database is down. Basically it is a container for alert logs, trace logs, audit logs and the same files in XML format that reside in a structured directory organization. The Oracle Initialization Parameter – DIAGNOSTIC_DEST determines the location of the ADR Base. If you set ORACLE_BASE as most everyone does then DIAGNOSTIC_DEST is set to the directory designated by ORACEL_BASE. If you do not set the environment variable ORACLE_BASE then Oracle defaults the location of the ADR to ORACLE_HOME/log.
Within the ADR Base, there can be multiple ADR homes, where each ADR home is the root directory for all diagnostic data – traces, dumps, alert log, …. for a particular instance for one particular Oracle product or component. For example, if you use Oracle Real Application Clusters, the environment for ASM, each database instance and each ASM instance has an ADR home. All ADR homes share the same hierarchical directory structure.
The location of an ADR home is given by the following path, which starts at the base directory of the ADR structure:
diag/product_type/product_id/instance_id
where:
product_type can be rdbms, asm, client
product_id can be database name
instance_id is the SID
ADR Home Subdirectories
Diagnostic data is stored within various subdirectories with the ADR structure. Keep in mind that the ADR Base can be shared by other products and other Oracle databases (multiple SIDs).
The subdirectory alert contains the XML format of the alert log, cdump still contains the core dump files, incident (new) contains multiple subdirectories which are named for each particular incident or problem and each subdirectory contains the dumps for that specific problem. The trace subdirectory contains the background and server process trace files as well as any SQL trace files. There are other subdirectories which contain information such as the health check reports, monitor reports, etc.
ADR for RAC (Real Application Clusters)
… for another day
