Oracle Alerts Basics

1. What are Oracle Alerts?
Oracle Alerts are used to monitor unusual or critical activity within a designated database. The flexibility of ALERTS allows a database administrator the ability to monitor activities from tablespace sizing to activities associated with particular applications (i.e. AP, GL, FA).
Alerts can be created to monitor a process in the database and to notify a specific individual of the status of the process.

2. What are the types of Oracle Alerts?
There are 2 types of alerts: Event Alerts and Periodic Alerts
EVENT ALERTS: are triggered when an event or change is made to a table in the database.
PERIODIC ALERTS: are activated on a scheduled basis to monitor database activities or changes.

3. What types of actions can be generated when an Alert is triggered?
When an alert is triggered or the event is true, the alert can Email, send or print a message.
Alerts also have the ability to execute a SQL script to perform an action.
Using Response Processing, Oracle Alerts can solicit a response from a specific individual and perform an action based on the response that it receives.

4. Can I build an Alert to run with my custom applications or tables?
Event or Periodic Alerts can work with any custom application, as long as the application is properly registered within the Oracle Applications package.

5. Which Email packages work with Alerts?
Oracle Alert is designed to work with Oracle Office, Oracle Interoffice, UNIX Sendmail, IBM Lotus Notes and VMS Mail.

6. Can Alerts be triggered by other Tools? (i.e. other than Oracle Forms and concurrentprograms)
Oracle Alerts can only be triggered from an application that has been registered in Oracle Applications. Alerts cannot be triggered via SQL updates or deletes to an Alert activated trigger.

7. What is Response Processing?
Response processing is a component of Alerts which allows the recipients of an alert to reply with a message and have the applications take some action based on the response. Response Processing only works with Oracle Mail products.

8. Do I need Oracle Applications to use Alerts?
Yes. Oracle Applications is required to create and run Alerts.