Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Trace Analyzer

Trace analyzer is an application from Oracle with much the same purpose as TKPROF.  It is also designed to help analyze the trace files generated by SQL tracing.  Trace analyzer offers enhancements over TKPROF in a number of areas.  Several of the key improvements are discussed as follows:

• Trace Analyzer provides a more detailed list of wait events for every SQL statement that is part of the trace file. Whereas, only in recent versions has TKPROF provided at least limited wait information.  Older versions provide no information on wait events regardless of the trace data.

• Trace Analyzer reports totals for statements that execute multiple times; whereas, TKPROF would report each execution separately.  This is important when tracing a process that is updating many records, but doing it one row at a time.  Identifying this with TKPROF, requires more manual effort.

• Trace Analyzer provides the values used by bind variables, as long as the trace file was generated at a level that includes bind variables; whereas,  this feature is not available with TKPROF.

Trace Analyzer has other benefits that will be demonstrated in examples later this section as well as Chapter 6, in the Case Study section.  

Installation of this can be a bit tricky.  Unfortunately, this tool seems to be largely unknown or at least unused given the lack of hits when searching MOSC.  Even the World Wide Web comes up with little information on using this tool and troubleshooting its installation.  MOSC document 224270.1 provides an adequate explanation for finding the files to accomplish the installation as well as how to install and use it.

The above book excerpt is from:

Oracle Wait Event Tuning

High Performance with Wait Event Iinterface Analysis 

ISBN 0-9745993-7-9  

Stephen Andert 

http://www.rampant-books.com/book_2004_2_wait_tuning.htm