Tracing Oracle

Become the first to know definitively how your system is spending your users’ time.

Cary Millsap and Jeff Holt’s new book, Tracing Oracle, will elevate your tracing game. This book is 100% focused on helping you get the most detailed and reliable performance data that Oracle offers. It has a companion GitHub project designed to make tracing safe and convenient.

The book covers Oracle Databases both on-premises and in the cloud, including Oracle XE, SE, EE, Exadata, OCI and AWS as-a-service offerings, Oracle Autonomous Database deployments, and even 23c Free.

Tracing Oracle will teach you why, when, and how to trace Oracle application programs with surgical precision, so that you can be the first to know what’s really going on.

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Paperback

Tracing Oracle is the perfect companion to the authors’ gigantic 291-page Mastering Oracle Trace Data book. The red book is about obtaining ing the perfect trace file. The blue book is about what to do with that file once you’ve retrieved it.

PDF
Paperback

Your authors

Cary Millsap and Jeff Holt have been helping people optimize complex systems since the 1980s. They’ve helped improve performance for many of the world’s favorite brands.

In the early 2000s, Cary and Jeff invented the optimization method called “Method R.” In 2003 they published their revolutionary O’Reilly book, Optimizing Oracle Performance.

In the years since, they have taught thousands of people how to be better system optimizers. The software they’ve created helps people extract meaning from huge volumes of detailed Oracle traces.

Table of contents

  1. Getting Started
    1. Hello, World
    2. What Is a Trace?
    3. Why Trace?
  2. Preliminaries
    1. Privileges
    2. Parameters
    3. MAX_DUMP_FILE_SIZE
    4. Trace File Hygiene
    5. Be Kind, Please Rewind
  3. Tracing
    1. How to Trace a SQL Script
    2. How to Trace Someone Else’s Session
    3. How to Clean Up Your Enabled Traces
  4. Access
    1. Trace Directory Names
    2. Trace File Names
    3. Accessing Your Trace without Filesystem Access
    4. Identifying Your Trace Files
  5. Scoping
    1. What Is Scoping?
    2. How Should You Trace?
    3. How Application Developers Can Make Tracing Easier
    4. trcsess
    5. APPINFO
    6. Tracing with Triggers
    7. Tracing a Whole Database
  6. Levels
    1. Trace Levels
    2. Which Level Should You Use?
    3. Why We Recommend Not Tracing BINDS
    4. Why We Recommend Not Tracing ALL_EXECUTIONS
  7. Specific Technologies
    1. Oracle APEX
    2. Oracle E-Business Suite
    3. Oracle Connection Pooling
    4. Oracle Parallel Execution
    5. Oracle Scheduler
    6. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
    7. Amazon RDS for Oracle
    8. Oracle Database 23c
  8. Objections
    1. Will Tracing Slow Everything Down?
    2. What If Tracing Does Slow Something Down?
    3. Trace rates and Sizes
    4. Data Security
    5. Safeguards
  9. Proscriptions
    1. Don’t Use TRACEFILE_IDENTIFIER
    2. Don’t Trace with ALTER Statements
    3. Don’t Trace with the DBMS_SESSION Package
    4. Don’t Trace with the SQL_TRACE Parameter
    5. Don’t Trace with the DBMS_SYSTEM Package
    6. Don’t Trace with the DBMS_SUPPORT Package
  10. Autonomous Database
    1. ADB Deployments
    2. Why Would You Ever Trace an ADB System?
    3. Hello, World (ADB-D Remix)
    4. Hello, World (ADB-S Remix)
    5. Accessing ADB-S Traces
    6. Does ADB Offer the Trace Features You Need?
  11. Method R Commercial Software
    1. Method R Workbench
    2. Method R Trace Extension for Oracle SQL Developer