Using Auto Trace

TOAD will run the Oracle trace function for you, run TKPROF and display the important information in the Auto Trace tab of the results panel; see Figure 3.45.

Figure 3.45. TOAD Auto Trace tab.

If the Auto Trace feature is not turned on for your login session, TOAD will tell you that it is disabled and ask you if you want it enabled.

It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss all the various fields in this tab's output, but here are several of the most important fields:

• Recursive calls : Oracle sometimes issues additional SQL statements on behalf of the running SQL statement. This is called recursive calls. Reasons include many extents on the object, dynamic space allocation (with an insert), and dictionary cache misses. The trace facility also generates recursive calls.

• Db block gets : This is the number of database block gets; it can be either physical or logical reads.

• Physical reads direct : This is the number of block fetch requests issued by Oracle.

It is beyond the scope of this book to go into great depth as to the meaning and interpretation of these various statistics.

The user running Auto Trace will need access to the V$STATNAME and V$SESSTAT dictionary views as illustrated in Figure 3.46.

Figure 3.46. TOAD Auto Trace required permissions.