RAC Synchonous Alert File Reader

So you have 3 alert files from your 3 node RAC and you are trying to see what happened in the cluster as a whole. The Rac Synchro Reader will let you view the alert files of all 3 nodes side by side, with the timestamps aligned. When you scroll one alert file the others will scroll to a matching timestamp.

Windows executable. Others have found it works with the Listener logfiles, too. Tested for alertfiles from version 9 and 10.

{------------------
  Read alert-log files from RAC from several instances.
  Scrolling will scroll the text synchronised by the timestamps

  Usage:
    Open at least two ordinary alert files (up to 8 supported)
    Use the scroll bar.
      The marked filewindow will scroll according to the scrollbar
      The other files will scroll trying to match the visible timestamp
    Using the scrollbar in a filewindow will scroll that file
      without the others moving.

  Version beta 0.4 - (under development)

  Usage features To Be Implemented
    MouseWheel scroll to work for main scroll bar.
      (Or enable/disable individual scroll (Shift?) )
    ?Specify a time offset +/- factor to each file's timestamps
    Find string

   Known bugs - or "Will work or crash or do funny things"
      A zero byte in text files (stops input)
(The bug wih the "nul"-byte occurs in some unix based alert files, so 
strip nul bytes when trasnferring to you window machine. It is a bother 
for me to fix as the file is parsed by a delphi library routine.)
      No matching time found at all. (scrolls to EOF on slaves.)
        Should be TOF/EOF appropiate to best timestamp fix
      ?Start scrolling action(s) before >=2 files loaded. (Block until ready?)
      ?small files, huge files (Huge: CPU processing! avoid reparse)
      Non-alert files (parse trace files?!)
  The current search implementation it is "Quick and VERY dirty and CPU waste"
  ----------- } 

This program was written in Delphi (v4) This is the first "proof of concept" version (thus the 0.x version) where it does a brute force scan of the input files every time anything is scrolled. With the large computing power of any laptop/desktop this was sufficient to get the job done (for alertfiles < 1Mb) and the fancy version with parsing and mainting index pointers and other optimizations never got written.

One of these days I'll make a Java version so the linux people can se it, too.