10046 trace file content

Robert Freeman wrote in one of his articles:

  The 10046 trace file contents differ greatly between different versions of Oracle.


Indeed, format of trace files changes sometimes between Oracle versions but definitely not greatly.

Somewhere near 9.2.0.2 STAT lines changed a bit (row source execution statistics was added).
Instead of just:
STAT #2 id=1 cnt=1 pid=0 pos=1 obj=17 op='TABLE ACCESS FULL FILE$'
they started look like this:
STAT #2 id=1 cnt=1 pid=0 pos=1 obj=17 op='TABLE ACCESS FULL FILE$ (cr=4 pr=0 pw=0 time=91 us)'

And in 10.2 format of WAIT lines and BINDS sections changed significantly.

BINDS sections can not be processed by tkprof in any versions of Oracle so I just skip them.

As for WAIT lines, here's the pre-10.2 WAIT line:
WAIT #4: nam='SQL*Net message from client' ela= 2794957 p1=1111838976 p2=1 p3=0 p3=62
Compare it with 10.2:
WAIT #4: nam='SQL*Net message from client' ela= 2794957 driver id=1111838976 #bytes=1 p3=0 obj#=62 tim=42601199281

Wait events parameters (p1,p2,p3) got a meaningful name (as a side note: but sometimes not a meaningful value -- #bytes in 'SQL*Net messages' still always equal to 1) and every WAIT line now have tim-stamp.

The funny thing is that tkprof from Oracle 9.2 correctly process trace files from 10.2! Looks like tkprof parses WAIT line by splitting line on '=' character and just gets the first three values.

In summary, I beleive that when tkprof from old version can correctly process trace files from the new one then it's more natural to say that 'trace files contents does not differ greatly between different versions of Oracle'.