Instrumentation: DEBUG/LOGGING

In my previous entry on instrumenting code I detailed the way in which you could use the DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO.SET_SESSION_LONGOPS procedure to help monitor your long running code.

In this one, I will detail my home grown version of Tom Kyte's debug routine. I do know that others have similar code but can't seem to find them right now.

You can find the source code here.

Contents:
2 tables
2 sequences
1 package
1 procedure
1 build file

debug_tab allows you to turn the debugging on and off. debug_details_tab will store each line that you write to the debug routine when turned on.

Here's an example of it in practice:

CREATE OR REPLACE
FUNCTION get_age_in_months( p_id IN NUMBER ) RETURN NUMBER
IS
  l_age_in_months INTEGER;
BEGIN
  --instrumentation calls
  debug( 'GET_AGE_IN_MONTHS' );
  debug( 'P_ID:  ' || p_id );
  debug( 'select value into variable' );

  SELECT age_in_months
  INTO l_age_in_months
  FROM people_tab
  WHERE id = p_id;

  debug( 'L_AGE_IN_MONTHS:  ' || l_age_in_months );

  RETURN l_age_in_months;

EXCEPTION
  WHEN no_data_found THEN
    debug( 'no data found' );
    RETURN NULL;
END get_age_in_months;
/
show errors

I mentioned in the previous article that I had had difficulty grasping this concept initially. I think once I related it to DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE it became much more clear to me.

This simple debug routine has helped me tremendously in the last year or two that I have used it. Especially when you get nested levels of logic. It gets very hard to keep track of where you are, but with this you can run your procedure or function and then issue a SELECT against the debug_details_tab and see what was happening when.

I even began using this in my APEX applications. I would preface each line with "APEX: " and then write whatever was necessary so that I could step through the various pieces of code. It became crucial when I was doing validation on a table of records in a collection...oh so much easier.

On large systems this will generate a lot of data. I definitely would not put this inside a loop doing some sort of batch processing, but it is helpful to find where things fail out.

It can certainly be improved on. I basically took the idea of DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE and wrote it to a table, nothing fancy there. Mr. Kyte mentions writing it to the file system as well. Since I don't have ready access to the database file system, this was the easiest.

Make your life easier and use a debug/logging routine in your code. No longer will you have to comment, the debug statements should do it for you!