ORA-00600 on export to /dev/null

[Ralph Grothe]

Hello DBAs,

not being a DBA myself (with only most rudimentary Oracle/SAP knowledge) I wrote a Perl script (using DBD::Oracle) which among other things (e.g. dbverify) should make an export to /dev/null through a twice weekly cronjob as sort of consistency check.
An Oracle/SAP consultant told me you can do such thing even while the DB is offline.
The script is successfully running on my other servers, except for one where I get the ORA-00600 error at the end of the exp.log.
I understand this could relate to the NLS settings (we are using a German character set, guess some ISO-Latin1 or so).
Comparing the environments of the accounts that have the EXP_FULL_DATABASE role granted between my servers I found a deviating value of ORA_NLS33 (whatever this is needed for).
Before changing this var's value in the account's .profile or .login I included the following line in the BEGIN block of my script, which should set it already at compile time:

BEGIN {
# some other init stuff
@ENV{qw(ORA_NLS ORA_NLS32 ORA_NLS33)} =
qw(/oracle/A01/ocommon/NLS_723/admin/data
/oracle/A01/ocommon/NLS_733/admin/data
/oracle/A01/ocommon/NLS_804/admin/data);
}

Later in the script (for the export part) I do an exec to Oracle's exp command handing over the needed args.
My understanding of exec is that it inherits the whole environment of the parent process that spawned it but never returns to it.
Am I wrong here?
However, this morning when I inspected the exp.log the ORA-00600 still lurked up.
Or am I on a completely wrong track, and Oracle is signaling me different innuendos?

Regards
Ralph

[John Palmer]

Hi Ralph,

ORA-00600 errors are caused by bugs in Oracle possibly even datafile corruption.

There appears to be nothing wrong with the way that you are running export.

There are known errors with export but more information is required about the version that you are running etc.

I would check the database alert log for more information and if you have Oracle support, consult them for advice.

Regards,
John

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi John,

For the version I am using,
when I head stderr of "exp help=y" it displays this release level:

Export: Release 8.0.5.2.1 - Production on Wed Oct 25 13:51:24 2000

(c) Copyright 1998 Oracle Corporation. All rights reserved.


Meanwhile I had a look at the alert log but for the interval when the export started up to exp.log's mtime I couldn't see any error notifications therein.

Anyway, thank you for the reassuring words.
They were somewhat of a relief to me. :-)