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TVD$XTAT    TriVaDis eXtended Tracefile Analysis Tool

Author

Copyright 2000-2017 by Christian Antognini
Trivadis AG
Sägereistrasse 29
CH-8152 Glattbrugg / Zürich

Date

1 March 2017

Version

4.0 Beta 11

Purpose

This REAME gives the following information about TVD$XTAT:
Introduction
License and Distribution
Requirements
Installation
Utilization

Introduction

In late 1999, I had my first encounter with extended SQL trace, through the Oracle Support note Interpreting Raw SQL_TRACE and DBMS_SUPPORT.START_TRACE output (39817.1). From the beginning, it was clear that the information it provided was essential for understanding what an application is doing when it's connected to Oracle Database. At the same time, I was very disappointed that no tool was available for analyzing extended SQL trace files for the purpose of leveraging their content. I should note that TKPROF at that time didn't provide information about wait events. After spending too much time manually extracting information from the raw trace files through command-line tools like awk, I decided to write my own analysis tool: TVD$XTAT.

Currently, TKPROF provides information about wait events, but it still has five major problems that are addressed in TVD$XTAT:

License and Distribution

some rights reserved

TVD$XTAT is free and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

This software is provided "as is" and any expressed or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the author be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

Requirements

Java Runtime Environment 1.5.0 or newer.

Installation

Here's how to install TVD$XTAT:

Utilization

If you run TVD$XTAT without arguments, you get a complete list of the available arguments with a short description for each of them. Note that for every argument, there's a short representation (for example, -c) and a long representation (for example, --cleanup):

usage: tvdxtat [-c no|yes] [-f ] [-l ] [-r 7|8|9|10|11|12]
               [-s no|yes] [-t <template>] [-w no|yes]
               [-x severe|warning|info|fine|finer] -i <input> -o <output>
 -c,--cleanup     remove temporary XML file (no|yes)
 -f,--feedback    display progress every x lines (integer number >= 0, no
                  progress = 0)
 -h,--help        display this help information and exit
 -i,--input       input trace file name (valid extensions: trc|gz|zip)
 -l,--limit       limit the size of lists (e.g. number of statements) in
                  the output file (integer number >= 0, unlimited = 0)
 -o,--output      output file name (a temporary XML file with the same
                  name but with the extension xml is also created)
 -r,--release     major release of the database engine that generated the
                  input trace file (7|8|9|10|11|12)
 -s,--sys         report information about SYS recursive statements
                  (no|yes)
 -t,--template    name of the XSL template used to generate the output
                  file (active|html|text)
 -v,--version     print product version and exit
 -w,--wait        report detailed information about wait events (no|yes)
 -x,--logging     logging level (severe|warning|info|fine|finer)

The function of each argument is as follows:

My book, Troubleshooting Oracle Performance, fully describes how to leverage the output generated by TVD$XTAT to identify performance problems.