ADRCI Retention Policy and Ad-Hoc Purge Script for all Bases

As you know, since 11g we have a Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR). To better manage it, we also have a Command-line Interface, called ADRCI.
ADR contains all diagnostic information for database (logs, traces, incidents, problems, etc).

ADR Structure

ADRCI is a powerful tool, but unfortunately misunderstood and sub-used.
But I’m not going to retype all that Tim Hall already done for us. 😀

The objective of this post, however, isn’t to show all good from ADRCI, but share a how configure retention policiy and a quick script to clean logs from all homes in the server:

1. Setting Retention Policy:
First thing is to understand these two guys:
– LONGP_POLICY (long term) defaults to 365 days and relates to things like Incidents and Health Monitor warnings.
– SHORTP_POLICY (short term) defaults to 30 days and relates to things like trace and core dump files

They are setted by default with  720 hours (30 days) for the Short Term and 8760 hours (One year) for the long term category. See:

adrci> show control
ADR Home = /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/mydb/mydb:
*************************************************************************
ADRID                SHORTP_POLICY        LONGP_POLICY         LAST_MOD_TIME                            LAST_AUTOPRG_TIME
-------------------- -------------------- -------------------- ---------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------
1067873839           720                  8760                 2013-08-10 15:42:04.686159 +00:00        2016-04-25 20:53:28.159552 +00:00

We can change this by using the ADRCI command ‘set control’. Look at example for changing the retention to 15 days for the Short Term policy attribute:
(note it’s defined by hours!)

adrci> set control (SHORTP_POLICY=360)
adrci> show control
ADR Home = /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/mydb/mydb:
*************************************************************************
ADRID                SHORTP_POLICY        LONGP_POLICY         LAST_MOD_TIME                            LAST_AUTOPRG_TIME
-------------------- -------------------- -------------------- ---------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------
1067873839           360                  8760                 2016-04-29 13:30:03.361811 +00:00        2016-04-25 20:53:28.159552 +00:00

Now let’s run a “Purge” using this parameter:

adrci> purge

And see last autopurge:

adrci> show control
ADR Home = /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/mydb/mydb:
*************************************************************************
ADRID                SHORTP_POLICY        LONGP_POLICY         LAST_MOD_TIME                            LAST_AUTOPRG_TIME
-------------------- -------------------- -------------------- ---------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------
1067873839           360                  8760                 2016-04-29 13:30:03.361811 +00:00        2016-04-29 13:30:29.153407 +00:00

2. Ad-Hoc Purge Script:
The manual execution basically uses “purge -age” clause. The important thing is that in this case you must user minutes instead of hours. Pay attention!

There is a lot of scripts on the net. But my personal script for ad-hoc/manual purges is:

AGE7DAYS=10080
AGE10DAYS=14400
AGE15DAYS=21600
AGE30DAYS=43200
PURGETARGET=$AGE15DAYS
for f in $( adrci exec="show homes" | grep -v "ADR Homes:" );
do
echo "Purging ${f}:";
adrci exec="set home $f; purge -age $PURGETARGET ;" ;
done

That’s it!
Have a nice day!
Matheus.