Redo Log Filename Extension

I have to say that I really like the oracle-l mailing list. It tends to stay pretty focused on DBA stuff, there’s a low volume of spam and there are a lot of really smart guys who post there.

I was just catching up on some threads from last week and a comment about how to name redo logs caught my eye. I’m always interested in best practice type stuff and this is a pretty good tip. Basically the suggestion was to not give your online logs the file extension “log” – because… well everytime you write a script, what do you name the file with the output? xxxxx.log! Additionally, archived logs often have this same extension and someone (not you of course) could accidentally delete the online logs in the process of cleaning up archived logs. Or delete the archived logs in the process of cleaning up custom script log files. (For the same reason, it’s a good idea not to let archived logs have the extension “log” either.)

The whole thread is available on the oracle-l archives; look for the subject line “RMAN Recovery”.

Rick Weiss:

I finally get the chance to recover from a failure and it turns out to be the worst kind – DW (NOARCHIVELOG)

The cause of my problem was an erroneous rm *.log that whacked all the redologs by an analyst trying to clean out a bunch of Oracle Warehouse Builder ETL log files.

Jason Heinrich:

Funny, I just read an AskTom post yesterday where he recommended against naming your redo logs with the .log extension for this very reason.

I looked around on asktom a bit but I wasn’t able to find the question Jason referenced… but regardless, you should give your online logs a different extension like “rdo” or something. And archived logs should be named with an extension such as “arc”.