Enable PL/SQL tracing to track down issues in the distributed database.

To get full tracing, set the GWM_TRACE level as shown here. The following statement provides immediate tracing, but the trace is disabled after a database restart.

ALTER SYSTEM SET EVENTS 'immediate trace name GWM_TRACE level 263';

To disable the GWM_TRACE, issue:

ALTER SYSTEM SET EVENTS 'immediate trace name GWM_TRACE level 200';

The following statement enables tracing that continues in perpetuity, but only after restarting the database.

ALTER SYSTEM SET EVENT='10798 trace name context forever, level 7' SCOPE=spfile;

It is recommended that you set both of the above traces to be thorough.

To trace everything in the distributed database environment, you must enable tracing on the shard catalog and all of the shards. The traces are written to the RDBMS session trace file for either the GDSCTL session on the shard catalog, or the session(s) created by the shard director (also called GSM) on the individual shards.

There are several places to look for trace and alert logs in the distributed database environment.

Standard RDBMS trace files located in diag/rdbms/.. will contain trace output.

Output from ‘deploy’ will go to job queue trace files db_unique_name_jXXX_PID.trc.

Output from other GDSCTL commands will go to either a shared server trace file db_unique_name_sXXX_PID.trc or dedicated trace file db_unique_name_ora_PID.trc depending on connect strings used.

Shared servers are typically used for many of the connections to the catalog and shards, so the tracing is in a shared server trace file named SID_s00*.trc.

GDSCTL has several commands that can display status and error information.

Use GDSCTL STATUS GSM to view locations for shard director (GSM) trace and log files.

GDSCTL> status
Alias                     SHARDDIRECTOR1
Version                   18.0.0.0.0
Start Date                25-FEB-2016 07:27:39
Trace Level               support
Listener Log File         /u01/app/oracle/diag/gsm/slc05abw/sharddirector1/alert/log.xml
Listener Trace File       /u01/app/oracle/diag/gsm/slc05abw/sharddirector1/trace/
ora_10516_139939557888352.trc
Endpoint summary          (ADDRESS=(HOST=shard0)(PORT=1571)(PROTOCOL=tcp))
GSMOCI Version            2.2.1
Mastership                N
Connected to GDS catalog  Y
Process Id                10535
Number of reconnections   0
Pending tasks.     Total  0
Tasks in  process. Total  0
Regional Mastership       TRUE
Total messages published  71702
Time Zone                 +00:00
Orphaned Buddy Regions:   None
GDS region                region1
Network metrics:
   Region: region2 Network factor:0

The non-XML version of the alert.log file can be found in the /trace directory as shown here.

/u01/app/oracle/diag/gsm/shard-director-node/sharddirector1/trace/alert*.log

To decrypt log output in GSM use the following command.

GDSCTL> set _event 17 -config_only

Primary shard director (GSM) trace/alert files include status and errors on any and all asynchronous commands or background tasks (move chunk, split chunk, deploy, shard registration, Data Guard configuration, shard DDL processing, etc.)

To find pending AQ requests for the shard director, including error status, use GDSCTL CONFIG.

To see ongoing and scheduled chunk movement, use GDSCTL CONFIG CHUNKS -show_reshard

To see shards with failed DDLs, use GDSCTL SHOW DDL -failed_only

To see the DDL error information for a given shard, use GDSCTL CONFIG SHARD -shard shard_name