Batch logging -- what do you use?

Question

I have a new 10g database. We want to write some long running overnight batches. I wish to introduce a logging process. If we switch this on (ie set logging = yes) I want each process to write error and information messages to a new batch log file.
In other databases we have written some in house batch logger stuff which is a pain to support. Surely every major installation must do this and I dont want to write a bit of logging software.
Q) Is there a standard logger you all use? Do oracle provide one?
Note I have already looked at log4plsq but this seems to rely on dbms output which I am not happy with as you can easily break the buffer limit.

Answer 1

No I dont think so. I would have thought that all
major batch processing systems have this requirement
in general to write error/info/debug information to a
file or table.True. Different applications may well have different requirements, however. Generic frameworks are great for logging unstructured information. Custom frameworks tend to be more useful when you need to log more structured information (i.e. writing exceptions to a table, logging application-specific status messages for monitoring, etc).
I am aware of this approach but this does have a few
limitations mainly :
a)if the tablespace is full then you are unlikely to
write to the tableTrue. However tablespaces filling up generally trigger pages to DBAs, so it's relatively unlikely that anything your application logs in this situation will be beneficial. I
b)writing of to the table has to be handled
independent of the commit strategy of the main
program.Not if you use autonomous transactions
c) we have requirement that this informaiton is
written to a fileIt seems somewhat silly to me to log to a flat file from a database-- having error information in tables lets you query it much more efficiently than you can search a bunch of flat files. File I/O also tends to be quite expensive relative to table writes, which can really hurt batch processes. Log4PLSQL, however, does permit you to log to the alert log or to a database trace file.
Justin
Looks like APC beat me to it and covered the same points I did. Glad to see we generally agree.
Message was edited by:
Justin Cave