Note 29321 - Creating traces for BR Tools

Summary

Symptom

To be able to analyze a problem in a BR Tool (brarchive, brbackup, brconnect, brrestore), you need to determine trace information in addition to the normal log information.

Other terms

Debugging

Reason and Prerequisites

As a rule, the information written in a normal log file is sufficient for finding the source of a problem. Therefore, a trace is mostly required only for Development Support. In individual cases (for example, to determine a long-running SQL statement as part of a call of a BR Tool or to determine the actual environment where the tool runs), activating the trace may also make sense outside SAP development.

Caution: Restrictions

• Activate the trace in exceptional situations only, if you know exactly which consequences the activation of the trace will have.

• Note that the system sometimes writes an extremely high volume of trace data. For this reason, the file system needs to be sufficiently large and the size of the trace file needs to be monitored.

• Most trace information can be interpreted correctly only by development. Only a part of the information (such as executed SQL statements or environment settings) can be analyzed usefully outside of development.
  

Solution

You can activate a trace of the BR Tools by setting the environment variable BR_TRACE = or by setting the parameter "-TRC ". The following trace levels exist:

• Trace level 1:
  Tracing the calls of external programs (for example, dd, sqlplus):

• Command lines of external calls

• Output of external calls

Note: In BRCONNECT and BRSPACE, trace level 1 causes SQL statements to be traced (like on trace level 2) which does not include the comprehensive selections of the database objects in the initialization phase.

• Trace level 2:
  Tracing SQL statements:

• SQL commands called

• Output of SQL commands

• Trace level 4:
  Tracing the call of internal functions:

• Private C-functions called

• Return codes of private C-functions called

• Trace level 8:
  Output of environment information:

• All call options

• All environment variables
  

The trace levels can be combined. Trace level 3 (1 + 2) means that both the calls of external programs and SQL commands are logged.

The trace information is written to the detailed log of the program. They are an enhancement of the normal log.

Example:
--------
UNIX:
setenv BR_TRACE 15
Windows:
set BR_TRACE=15

Header Data

Release Status:	Released for Customer
Released on:	04.10.2011 14:46:05
Master Language:	German
Priority:	Recommendations/additional info
Category:	Consulting
Primary Component:	BC-DB-ORA-DBA Database Administration with Oracle