Oracle Database 11 g - Online Public Access Catalog

CHAPTER 1 ■ INSTALLING, UPGRADING, AND MANAGING CHANGE 39Types of Data Captured in the WorkloadThe workload you capture from the production system consists of the following types of SQL calls:• Data Manipulation Language (DML) statements• Data Definition Language (DDL) statements• Session control calls such as alter session• System control calls such as alter systemAny background activities and scheduled jobs aren’t part of the data capture. Client requestssuch as a direct path load of data from external files using SQL*Loader, database links, externaltables, Oracle Streams, non-SQL-based object access, and distributed transactions are thetypes of data that aren’t captured as part of the database workload.Oracle recommends you use the Oracle Enterprise Manager (Database Control or GridControl) to capture and replay the workload data. However, you can also use APIs availablethrough the new Oracle packages DBMS_WORKLOAD_CAPTURE and DBMS_WORKLOAD_REPLAY to performthe workload capture and replay that are at the heart of the Database Replay feature. You usethe procedures from the DBMS_WORKLOAD_CAPTURE package to capture the production workloadand the procedures from the DBMS_WORKLOAD_REPLAY package to replay the captured productionworkload on the test system. You must have either the dba privilege or theexecute_catalog_role privilege to use the two packages. In this chapter, we show you how touse the various procedures of these two key new Oracle packages to work with the DatabaseReplay feature.Before you can capture the workload, you must create a directory that’ll hold the capturedworkload data. You must also back up the database before the capture process begins so youcan replay the captured data on a system with an identical application state as that of the sourcedatabase. You can use filters (with the add_filter procedure) to avoid capturing some usersessions such as the Oracle Enterprise Manager sessions or DBA actions, which aren’t deemedpart of the database workload for the purposes of change management.■Tip Add the workload directory as part of your database OFA file system standards: mkdir -p$ORACLE_BASE/admin/$ORACLE_SID/workload.We briefly describe how to perform each of the four key steps of Database Replay in thefollowing sections.Capturing the WorkloadDuring the workload capture phase, Database Replay will capture all requests made by externalclients to the Oracle database. These external client requests primarily include calls made byapplications such as SQL*Plus and middle-tier components. Information pertaining to callsmade by the external clients, such as SQL text and bind values, are collected and stored in whatare known as capture files in a location chosen by you (in binary format).