Historical Bind Variable Storage

Question:  I need to see historical SQL with the bind variables used.  Does AWR or STATSPACK store bind variable information?  Does Oracle store SQL bind variable values anywhere?

Answer:  Only the PGA stores specific bind variable and cursor values, and these are not kept for historical analysis.  

The extra cost AWR allows you to see a “representative” sample bind variable value, but all bind variable values are NOT present.  In Oracle 10g and beyond, bind variables are periodically captured in the v$sql_bind_capture and dba_hist_sqlbind views, but these are bind variables or ONLY for a single, specific session, and not all historical session bind variables for a SQL statement are kept.   

This is because the amount of disk storage to keep a history of all bind variable values would be huge, especially for database that process thousands of transactions per second.  

These limited bind values can be found in some AWR and ASH tables as well as the v$sql_plan view.  Also, DML statements will have bind variable information in the archived redo logs available via LogMiner.  

The best way to collect bind variable for any SQL statement is by using TKPROF (a 10046 trace).

v$sql_plan Bind Variable Display  

The v$sql_plan only shows Systemwide values and it does not contain session-level bind variable values.  However, you can use the dbms_xplan.display package to display a sample bind variable:

select
    sql_text,
    other_xml
from
    $sql_plan
where
    sql_id=’XXXX’
and
    id=0;

AWR dba_hist_sqlstat Bind Variable Display

select
   sql_text,
   other_xml
from
    $dba_hist_sqlplan
where
    sql_id=’XXXX’
and
    id=0;

Or you can use the dbms_xplan_display_awr procedure to see a sample bind variable:

select
   *
from
    table(dbms_xplan.display_awr(‘&SQL_ID’,NULL,NULL,’ADVANCED’))

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