Cary Millsap recently published a paper “Mastering Performance with Extended SQL Trace” describing how to use Oracle trace to assist with troubleshooting the performance of database queries. As with all of Cary Millsap’s papers it is superbly written, presenting very detailed information in a clear and understandable way. (and yes I do have a DBA crush ;-)) It discusses how you can automate the tracing of specific sessions on the database, and requiring the application to be appropriately instrumented.

As well as tinkering with the sawserver (Presentation Services) logging level and format, we can specific which bits of the log we’re interested in. This is useful for two reasons: We can enable detailed logging for a specific area, without impacting performance as much as detailed logging throughout would cause By only logging in detail the area of interest we can more easily read the log output and not have to wade through pages of irrelevant information Chapter 9 (“Using the Oracle BI Presentation Services Logging Facility”) of the Presentation Services Administration Guide details the log configuration.

I posted a while ago about the sawserver (Presentation Services) log configuration file. Today I’m doing some work digging around why sawserver’s throwing an error and so increased the log detail. This parameter is really helpful to use: fmtName=“short” Consider in these two screenshots, the first is with the default log format and shows about six entries. The second is short log format and is about ten times as much data.

The configuration of how Presentation Services (sawserver) does its logging is in the file web/config/logconfig.xml (same directory as instanceconfig.xml). It’s all nice and XML’d: Logging Detail Change the numerical values in the FilterRecord entries to alter the detail level of the logging. Lower means less detail, higher means more. Be aware that your log files can grow very rapidly if you set the logging too high, and unless you’re troubleshooting then leave them at the defaults.