How to identify tracefile in 11g

It’s quite often that DBA needs to enable tracing for a particular session to diagnose the performance or any other issue, which create trace file(s) in user_dump_directory. Usually this directory contains hundreds of files on a medium/large user base system, DBA needs to identify the OS process id to identify the trace file.

Naming Convention of user trace file is <<instance_name>>_ora_<<process id>>.trc under user_dump_directory. Oracle also provide option to use tracefile_identifire which can be utilized to make file name unique to identify easily.

Tracefile identifire will be appended in the name of file.In 11g, It has become very easy to identify the trace file directly from v$process view. Column named “Tracefile” has been added to this view.


SQL> select tracefile from v$process join v$session on (addr=paddr)
2 where sid = 76;

TRACEFILE
-------------------------------------------------------------------
/u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/test/test1/trace/test1_ora_27817.trc


SID 76 is my session id.

After setting Tracefile Identifier.

SQL> alter session set tracefile_identifier='JS';

Session altered.

SQL> select tracefile from v$process join v$session on (addr=paddr)
2 where sys_context('userenv','sessionid') = audsid
3 /

TRACEFILE
-------------------------------------------------------------------
/u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/test/test1/trace/test1_ora_27817_JS.trc


Note – I have removed SID and using sys_context… function to identify the current session. SID is useful to identify end-user’s sessions.

This column will always be populated with name of trace file even there has been no file generated.

SQL> ! ls -l /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/test/test1/trace/test1_ora_27817_JS.trc
ls: /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/test/test1/trace/test1_ora_27817_JS.trc: No such file or directory


After enabling trace.

SQL> alter session set sql_trace=true;

Session altered.

SQL> !ls -l /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/test/test1/trace/test1_ora_27817_JS.trc
-rw-r----- 1 oracle dba 1101 Oct 3 07:10 /u01/app/oracle/diag/rdbms/test/test1/trace/test1_ora_27817_JS.trc

before 11g, below query can be utilized to identify the trace file.


SQL> select u_dump.value || '/' || instance.value || '_ora_' || v$process.spid
|| nvl2(v$process.traceid, '_' || v$process.traceid, null ) || '.trc'"Trace File"
from V$PARAMETER u_dump
cross join V$PARAMETER instance
cross join V$PROCESS
join V$SESSION on v$process.addr = V$SESSION.paddr
where u_dump.name = 'user_dump_dest'
and instance.name = 'instance_name'
and V$SESSION.audsid=sys_context('userenv','sessionid');


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