7.1.1 DBMS_PROFILER Programs

The DBMS_PROFILER package contains the two functions listed in Table 7.2.

7.1.2 Installing DBMS_PROFILER

The DBMS_PROFILER package may not have been installed automatically for you when the database was set up. In this case, you will need to install the package specification and body. After that, you will want to create profiler tables and packages to help you analyze the output (stored in the profiler tables) more effectively.

Table 7.3 shows all of the files related to DBMS_PROFILER that you will probably want to run. You will find most of these files on Windows NT in one of the following directories (the exceptions are the demo files profrep.sql and profsum.sql), depending on how you installed the database:

Regardless of the higher-level directory structure, these files will always be found in the Rdbms\Admin subdirectory under the Oracle 8.1 home directory.

You can define the profiler tables in each individual schema developers want to profile. You can also define the profiler tables in a central schema, to be shared among multiple developers. In this case, you need to grant full access to all of the tables and to the sequence that defines the run number. You will also need to create public synonyms.

The profiler will not profile a PL/SQL block unless the current user has CREATE access on the block.

7.1.3 DBMS_PROFILER Example

It's certainly easy enough to use the PL/SQL profiler. Here's an example of the code you would execute:

/* Filename on companion disk: profiler.sql */
BEGIN
   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE (
      DBMS_PROFILER.START_PROFILER (
         'showemps ' || 
         TO_CHAR (SYSDATE, 'YYYYMMDD HH24:MI:SS')
         )
      );
   showemps;
   DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE (
      DBMS_PROFILER.STOP_PROFILER);
END;
/

If you do not pass an argument to START_PROFILER, then the "name" of the profile run is SYSDATE. In the example just given, I want to record both the name of the program I am running and the date-time stamp so that I can distinguish this run from others for the same program.

7.1.4 Profiler Return Codes

Both START_PROFILER and END_PROFILER are functions that return a status code. A value of 0 means that the program was called successfully. A nonzero return code indicates a problem, and may be one of the values listed in Table 7.4.

Consider yourself warned: unless you are running a very simple application, the profiler will write thousands of rows of data to its tables. To make it easier for you to manage all this information, I have created the following scripts, located on the companion disk:

proftrunc.sql

Truncates all three profiling tables

profdel.sql

Deletes all rows from the three profiling tables for the specified run number