In the Oracle Administrator's Guide (12c) under "Monitoring Errors with Trace Files and the Alert Log" is the following text:
The alert log is a chronological log of messages and errors, and includes the following items:
- All internal errors (ORA-00600), block corruption errors (ORA-01578), and deadlock errors (ORA-00060) that occur
- Administrative operations, such as CREATE, ALTER, and DROP statements and STARTUP, SHUTDOWN, and ARCHIVELOG statements
- Messages and errors relating to the functions of shared server and dispatcher processes
- Errors occurring during the automatic refresh of a materialized view
- The values of all initialization parameters that had nondefault values at the time the database and instance start
My question is about the second (bolded) bullet point. I could perhaps be accused of not monitoring my alert log as closely as I should, but I haven't noticed CREATE/ALTER/DROP statements in there. I went to one of my test instances and created a table. No message was written to the alert log. I did a logfile switch just to make sure I was looking at the right file. Yep -- the switch appeared in the log. I dropped my test table -- again no alert log entry was created.
So my question is whether the above is a documentation error or am I'm missing some piece of the puzzle?