Dont stress your database beyond its limits, or otherwise it might commit suicide

Running into ORA-600 is somewhat a daily affair for an Oracle DBA, but an ORA-600 that led the database to commit suicide, could be classified a true example of "once in a blue moon" event

As part of a consulting engagement in Pittsburgh, I was working to troubleshoot the erratic behavior of database parallelism. At a point, we decided to add some parameters within RMAN to test the impact. As a part of scanning all of the traces generated from crash dump, looking for pointers and possible trends, we witnessed something that appeared to be quite unusual, with the traces admitting database having committed suicide

/u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/dwdev/trace>tail -10 /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/dwdev/trace/dwdev_smon_23343.trc
0xffffffff7df70000 - 0xffffffff7dfc0000    320K    8K     0xffffffff rw---  [ anon ]
0xffffffff7dfc0000 - 0xffffffff7dfe0000    128K    8K     0xffffffff rw---  [ anon ]
0xffffffff7dfe0000 - 0xffffffff7dff0000     64K    8K     0xffffffff rw---  [ anon ]
0xffffffff7ffb0000 - 0xffffffff80000000    320K    8K     0xffffffff rw---  [ stack ]
******************* End of process map dump ****************

internal error ORA-600 seen on the error stack process appears to be having problems repeatedly, committing suicide Background_Core_Dump = partial
ksdbgcra: writing core file to directory '/u01/app/oracle/admin/dwdev/cdump'
/u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/dwdev/trace>

As a followup, we checked to realize the smon process was indeed dead ...