Goldengate Log Rotation

Golden Gate 12 has some excellent commands to keep your log files in check, plus one glaring omission (scheduled for a future enhancement)

Each extract, datapump and replicat will be writing to report (.rpt) and discard (.dsc) files in the dirrpt directory (if you aren’t specifying a discard file, you should. They are very useful for troubleshooting)
If your system is up for a long time, these files are going to get large. Oracle has realised this and provides some lovely in-built log rotation commands. To keep my parameter (.prm) files nice and neat and consistent, I use include files, and this is a perfect case for a standard include.

report.prm:

-- Standard include commands for ALL extracts and replicats to ensure they are aligned
-- Write the days stats out to the file at the end of every day.
-- Roll the file over every week
-- Report just how much throughput we have every 15 minutes
-- History: 14.04.2015 N Chandler 
-- place the command include/dirprm/report.prm in your parameter files

STATOPTIONS REPORTDETAIL, RESETREPORTSTATS
REPORT AT 23:59
REPORTROLLOVER AT 00:01 ON MONDAY
REPORTCOUNT EVERY 15 MINUTES, RATE
-- or if you would rather by volume...
--REPORTCOUNT EVERY 10000000 RECORDS, RATE

I think it’s worth pointing out here what the 2 bracketed throughput numbers output by the REPORTCOUNT commands mean, as you’ll struggle to find it in the documentation

Rate  = number of records processed per second since startup divided by the total time since startup of the extract/replicat
Delta = number of records processed per second since last report divided by time since last report (in this case, 15 minutes)

There is 1 notable growing file which you cannot rotate using Goldengate commands: ggserr.log

This is a significant oversight by Oracle and will be rectified in a future release, but as of 12.1 you have to manually sort this out. You have 2 main options to do this:

1. Stop the manager, rename the file, restart the manager
2. Copy the file to a new file and then empty the in-place file by catting /dev/null into it. (I’m sure there’s a Windows equivalent of this, but I mainly work on Unix)
* DO NOT simply delete the file while the manager is running.
All future error output will drop into a “black hole” until the manager is restarted.   Option 2 tends to be preferably, so here’s part of a bash script I use to perform this action

#!/bin/bash
# rotate_ggserr_log.sh - copies the logfile to one side with a date suffix and blows away the current file
# but leaves it in place to we can continue to write to it with the manager.
# Neil Chandler 14.04.2015 created
#
today=`date +%Y%m%d`

-- Check to see if we have already rolled-over today
if [ -e /u99/gg/bin/ggserr.log.${today} ]
then
 echo "File /u99/gg/bin/ggserr.log.${today} exist already. Stopping."
else
 # copy the log file preserving attributes
 /bin/cp -pnv /u99/gg/bin/ggserr.log /u99/gg/bin/ggserr.log.${today}

 # See if there is a difference - did you copy it successfully?
 diff /u99/gg/bin/ggserr.log /u99/gg/bin/ggserr.log.${today}
 RC=$?

 # If there is no difference, wipe the ggserr.log file out
 # otherwise stop!
 if [ ${RC} -eq 0 ]
 then
  echo "clear the file /u99/gg/bin/ggserr.log"
  cat /dev/null > /u99/gg/bin/ggserr.log
  exit ${RC}
 else
  echo "Error - cannot clear file /u99/gg/bin/ggserr.log as it's not the same as the copied version. Stopping."
  exit ${RC}
 fi
fi