10053 viewer

Warning (2022): this viewer was written for trace files from Oracle 10g – it’s not supposed to work with earlier versions, and the more recent the version of Oracle the more likely you are to set that sections of the file are missing from the output.

I’ve been trying to find a way to post an executable for several weeks because I’ve been sent a simple viewer for 10053 trace files written by Hans-Peter Sloot of Atos Origin and Robert van der Ende. They wrote this viewer because trace files from event 10053 can be enormous, and scrolling back and fore through them to cross reference the interesting bits can be extremely tedious. Their “tree-viewer” allows you to see all the important headings and expand only the detail you’re interested in.

It works very simply: start the program from a command line, wait for the graphic interface to pop up and click on “Open trace file” to get a standard “File Open” menu from windows. After opening your selected file you get a drop-down list of registered queries in that file; scroll down to one of them and click on “Show trace file”. From that point on you can click on the “+” and “-” signs that appear in the text, or make use of the right (+) and left (-) arrows to expand and contract text.

The following is a screen snapshot (which may look very messy on smaller screens) of the tool in action:

I have managed to load it on to my own blog but had to do something a little strange with it. I’ve saved it on the site with a “.doc” suffix, so it appears to WordPress to be a Word document. To download it and use it you have to do the following:

• Right click on the link and choose the option to “save target as”
• The default filename to save will be tvzip1.doc
• Edit the filename to (something like) tv.zip and save
• You now have a zip file from which you can extract a file called tv10053.xxx
• change the extension of this file to .exe and you have the executable (DOS/Windows only).

I have tested the download and it does seem to be working properly.