Tip of the Week
Tip for Week of January 12, 2003

Write a Message to the Alert Log

This tip comes from Marco Gilbert, DBA at MRQ, in Ste-Foy, Québec, Canada.

If you want to write a message to the alert log, you can use the undocumented KSDWRT procedure of the DBMS_SYSTEM package.

This procedure has two parameters, the first one must be "2" to write to the alert file, the second one is the message you want to write.
Here is an example:

execute sys.dbms_system.ksdwrt(2,to_char(sysdate)|| ' -- ');