Master Oracle Tracing (Closed)

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

On April 5 and 6, 2023, Cary Millsap and Jeff Holt will lead a special insiders-only online course based on their not-yet-published book called Tracing Oracle. This course will provide early access to the book and much more.

Online registration for the April 5–6 event is closed. Please contact us if you have any questions.

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What you’ll get

If you enroll in this course, you’ll enjoy the following benefits:

  • You’ll get four hours’ worth of valuable online training from Cary Millsap and Jeff Holt. (You can see the detailed topics list below.)
  • You’ll get access to pre-publication PDFs of the book and the publication PDF when the book goes to print.
  • You’ll become a part of the Method R Slack workspace, where help is always available.
  • You’ll influence the book and be memorialized in the acknowledgments section (your company’s policies permitting, of course).
  • If you buy a package that includes a Method R software license, you’ll get access to the most comprehensive Oracle trace management software ever created, at an incredible price.

Course event

The course will be conducted live, on Zoom, in two 2-hour sessions:

  • Wednesday, April 5 10:30am–12:30pm CDT (15:30–17:30 UTC)
  • Thursday, April 6 10:30am–12:30pm CDT (15:30–17:30 UTC)
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Materials checklist

We will email you the following items before the course begins:

  • access to the pre-publication PDF of the Tracing Oracle book
  • the link for the two 2-hour Zoom sessions
  • an invitation to our Method R workspace on Slack
  • a request for confirmation that it’s OK to list you in the acknowledgments
  • any software license keys you’ve purchased

Your instructors

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 wrote 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.

Course content

  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 File System 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. APPINFO
    5. Tracing with Triggers
    6. 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 Cloud Infrastructure
    6. Amazon RDS for Oracle
  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. Why Would You Ever Trace an ADB System?
    2. ADB-D and ADB-S
    3. Hello, World (ADB-D Remix)
    4. Accessing ADB-D Traces
    5. Hello, World (ADB-S Remix)
    6. Accessing ADB-S Traces
    7. 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