Learning Bits and Bytes

Using Oracle trace files is the best way to investigate random performance issues. In a real world web application, it is not practical to enable database trace for entire database as it will result in performance degradation and generates huge trace files. Also it is difficult to dig out useful information from a large file. So the most efficient way is to enable trace for particular connections. Web applications use connection pools and there is no guarantee on which connection is used to serve each request. This makes it difficult to turn on trace for a particular connection. Here comes the Oracle client identifier (CLIENT_IDENTIFIER) to rescue. What is client identifier and how to set it?  Client identifier is a token which can be set by the application. This can be reset/changed by the client application. This identifier can be used to uniquely identify users associated with a connection. I suggest every serious application to set this identifier as this will come handy s...