Are all Oracle alert log errors 5 Digits long?

Question

Is there ever an error in the alert log where the Error numbers would be less than 5?

On a legacy list of ORA- ignoreable errors, Some are 2, 3, 4, and 5 numbers.

Ignore Error List ORA-3206 ORA-3297 ORA-38153 ORA-4036 ORA-48913 ORA-60 ORA-600 ORA-604 ORA-609 ORA-800 ORA-959

I'm hoping this was an older version thing and they've standardized on 5 digits.

I do not want the alert log sniffer to "miss" ORA- errors as it's doing a character-wise search and 00060 <> 60

Answer 1

All Oracle error messages are 5 digits long. The Database Error Messages documentation contains 9,188 pages of error numbers and descriptions. While I haven't read the whole document, the error ranges listed in the table of contents makes it clear that all error numbers must be 5 digits.

However, that does not necessarily mean that the alert log will always display 5 digits. There are at least two cases where you might see malformed error messages. But these cases may not be common enough or important enough to affect your alert log monitoring program.

1. Messages ORA-0 and SMG-4120 / SMG-4121 in the Alert Log File (Doc ID 756994.1) - According to the support document, this is a error in older versions of Oracle causes by a corrupt queue. And it's just an "informational" message anyway. However, I still see some lines in the alert log with ORA-0 when a process is killed on my 19c database.
2. Custom errors. This is unlikely, but users can write their own custom error messages to the alert log, and there's no guarantee custom programs will properly format error numbers.