New release! Version 2.1 includes significant upgrades to mrskew including a new RC file feature for automating common queries. Click here to see all the MR Tools new features.

What’s in a trace file? Incredible things: the reason your report is slow, proof that your SAN is falling down on the job, and a thousand other things you need to know. Oracle’s tkprof tells you only a fraction of the story. The MR Tools suite of software tools helps you get everything your trace files have to offer. They’re great companions for users of tkprof or Method R Profiler.

MR Tools is basically an all-in-one ETL + BI solution for Oracle database trace files.

Alex Gorbachev / Pythian / Ottawa, Canada

MR Tools is a collection of software tools executed from the command line, in the spirit of Unix filters. That means each tool has a singular focus; it does one thing and does it well. It means each tool’s behavior is customizable, with lots of powerful options. And it means that each tool works in harmony with other filters—think sort, grep, head, more, etc.—to exploit the full value of the powerful operating system scripting environment you already know and love.

The MR Tools suite consists of the following software tools. They run on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX, and Microsoft Windows.

mrskew — your trace file profiler and data miner

You won’t believe how much data is tucked away into a whole directory full of trace files. Trace files contain a record of where your Oracle Database has spent your time, and mrskew is the key to getting that information out in a way that anyone on your team can understand. It is the most remarkable piece of software that we’ve ever created. It can create response time profiles, for one file or a whole directory. It can drill into details like nothing you’ve ever seen. Which service/module/action combination accounts for your biggest time consumption? Which trace files account for the most time spent waiting for latch acquisitions? On what line of which trace file is your longest disk I/O call recorded? Which SQL statement accounts for the most time spent parsing? Which array fetch size accounts for your biggest consumption of response time? How many library cache misses have occurred on EXEC calls in sessions traced between Wednesday and Saturday? The answers to these questions and thousands more are one mrskew command away.

mrls — your trace file lister

Have you ever sat staring at a directory full of a thousand trace files, unable to figure out which one you needed to open next? Do you want to know which trace file accounts for the most response time? Which file accounts for the largest LIO count? Which file accounts for the most rows returned? With mrls, you’re only one quick command away from knowing.

mrcallrm — your trace file correction fluid

When you use trace data to profile end-user response time, it is vital that your trace file contain exactly the right trace lines. But sometimes, it’s nearly impossible to start or stop the tracing at exactly the right instant, so you end up with more trace data than you really want, and that throws off your profile. With mrcallrm, you can fix your trace file to make the unwanted lines go away. It’s harder than it looks, because for every line you delete, you have to adjust the tim and timestamp values throughout the remainder of the file. But with mrcallrm, it’s all automatic.

mrtim — your trace file tim calculator

Did you ever wonder what time that tim value on a line of trace data represents? With mrtim, you can convert tim values to timestamps and timestamps to tim values. Now you can join back into your Oracle Active Session History data to see what was going on in your system exactly when that trace file line was emitted.

mrtimfix — your trace file tim value fixer

Do you suffer from Oracle bug 7522002, an 11gR1 bug that corrupts the tim values in your trace files? It makes your tim values zigzag back and forth in time between your database call lines and your operating system call lines, which makes using a proper profiling tool on your trace data impossible to do. With mrtimfix, you can fix them right up. You can even convert the 1,024-nanosecond tim values that Oracle uses on some ports to proper Unix epoch microsecond values that all your tools can understand.

MR Tools: see your Oracle trace files in stunning high-definition.

Documentation

Click the following links to see the MR Tools product manual pages.

mrcallrm

mrls

mrskew

mrtim

mrtimfix

Product Change Log

Click here to view our MR Tools bug fixes and new features.

Licensing

There are two types of MR Tools licenses. A per-userid license permits one specific person to run a tool using a single login user id on a single machine (either real or virtual). A per-person (multi-platform) license permits one specific person to run a tool with any login id, on any system, anywhere. If you’ll run MR Tools on more than two login ids (for example, on more than two systems), then the per-person license is the better license for you.

Pricing

Price is us$397 per one-userid license; us$997 per one-person license.