ORA-00600 Internal Error Solution | Tips and Tricks | Oracle Database

How to resolve ORA-00600 Oracle Error? Tips and Tricks to resolve ORA-600 Error in Oracle Database.

This article explains the complexity of ORA-00600 error and what are the steps that can be taken in order to remove this error from your database server.

What is ORA-00600?

ORA-600 or ORA-7445 reports to generic internal errors which simply means that you are going to need some digging to actually find out what's happening to your server. This error can be because of multiple reasons. From a compatibility problem to data block corruption, any bad move can lead to these kind of internal errors. And most of the times, such errors are left unresolved. Because we are not able to find the source of the problem and after all the waste efforts, we call for the help of Oracle Support.

Below is the demo of one ORA-600 that I faced with my Database Server.

How crucial is this ORA-600?

These internal errors can lead to very big problems like unclean backups, data corruption etc. But there is a particular scenario that Oracle Database Server follows in case of any single activity that happens inside the server. Same is the case with these internal errors. Both ORA-600 and ORA-7445 errors will  be doing the following activities:

• Write the error message to the alert.log, along with details about the location of a trace containing further information.
• Write detailed information to a trace file in the location indicated in the alert.log
• In Oracle Database 11g Release 1 onward, create an incident and place the relevant files in the incident directory in the location defined by the DIAGNOSTIC_DEST initialization file parameter
• Write the error message to the user interface if the server process is not terminated or signal ORA-3113 if it is
• Often you will see multiple errors reported within the space of a few minutes, typically starting with an ORA-600. It is usually, but not always, the case that the first is the significant error and the others are side effects.

How to solve ORA-600 Internal Error?

Finding the source of the problem is important. Sometimes you won't be finding the source by checking the alert or trace logs. And neither these errors give you clear information about what exactly has happened with your server. A normal ORA-600 error will look like this

ORA-00600 internal error code, arguments: [string], [string], [string], [string], [string], [string], [string], [string]

There are alternative checks that can be made to make sure everything's fine because these internal errors can also be because of the following reasons:

• Timeouts 
• File corruption 
• Failed data checks in memory 
• Hardware, memory, or I/O errors 
• Incorrectly restored files 

Apart from these, these errors can also arrive in case of incompatibility like when you have installed a 32-bit Oracle Server on 64-bit Operating System. In such case of compatibility mismatch, the chances of the occurrence of these kind of errors is always high. So it will be a wise decision to use platform compatible versions like 32-bit software with 32-bit OS and 64-bit software with 64-bit OS.

After all the above checkups, if you are still left with unsolved ORA-600 then it'll be better to go for Oracle Support. If I come up with more detailed solution then I'll update that here in this article.