ORA-600 Error Code: Reasons & Resolutions

A database stores your business information in various data structures. The main function of a database is to retrieve data from its components and update them via executing queries. If there are interruptions in any of these operations, the database becomes vulnerable to corruption. One of the most intermittent errors faced by an Oracle DBA is ORA-600. This is an internal error thrown by the kernel of Oracle's RDBMS.

Surprisingly, the ORA-600 error is difficult to identify, as it may not show up explicitly on the screen. This means you may not know when the error has struck and caused damaged to your database. To detect an ORA-600 error, you need to check your trace files. You may also find an entry related to this error in the alert logs. The error ORA-600 always contains a few arguments enclosed in square brackets. These arguments may signify different things for different versions of the database. So, to find out the underlying reason for failure becomes a major challenge for the database administrator. Also, your log and trace files keep increasing in size due to repetitive multiple instances of the error.

A range of factors may be responsible for the occurrence of ORA-600. The error may be triggered by unexpected events of time-outs and file corruption. Otherwise, you may see this error due to data inconsistency in the memory, in input/output messages, or in your hardware. If you face a database failure or crash and do not restore the log files correctly, you may receive this error.

ORA-600 is often the most critical situation of database corruption and thus, should not be attempted on your own. Instead, you need to contact the Oracle support immediately and provide them with all the trace and log files corresponding to the database. Although finding the cause of this problem is a tedious job, some patches come as a workaround to resolve ORA-600 error. If the Oracle support fails to resolve the problem, you will lose all data within the database. You can perform database monitoring to be able to place a service request as soon as the error appears in the log.

There are abundant user-friendly, yet advanced Oracle recovery software on the market that may help you fix ORA-600. These competent utilities repair corruption in your database to recover every piece of lost or inaccessible information, such as tables, tablespaces, views, triggers, schemas, indexes, and more.