11g trace map files and first thoughts

Hey all,

I'm happy to say that it wasn't too difficult to get 11g installed on Gentoo. Just the usual RPM package nonsense and I needed to add CONFIG_MAGIC_SYSRQ to the kernel, but fairly straightforward. I then created a database using my 10gR2 set of scripts, nearly unmodified.

11g complained about the _dest init.ora parameters, but when I commented them all out and recreated the DB, the audit_file_dest parameter was still the same -- and not the default location! For now, I'm chalking it up to the two Jack Russel Captain Boomer's IPAs and being very late.

Aside from the extra XML logging generated, I see that there are .trm files in the former user_dump_dest, which have companion .trc files (same name, different extension). When I looked in the docs, the only reference to them said they're trace map files for indexing, but nothing more. So how are they used? They appear to be binary. I do like the new DIAGNOSTIC_DEST being out of the version-specific software directory, even if the directory tree appears at first glance to me to be overly deep. The only way it'll be really useful though is if all of Oracle's products use it (e.g. AS middle tier stuff for GC), otherwise my log checker will still have to search the entire ORACLE_BASE tree.

And it seems like with every new version, there's new extraneous trace files (and now companion trace maps) generated on create/startup. Other than that, Toad and SQL Developer don't balk at connecting to it. I saw at least one new background process (which generated some of the new traces), VKTM, but I want to look into this further. "Timekeeper" seems like an odd use for a process, but the docs aren't real specific.

I was just happy to see everything fired up, and other than a few seemingly minor anomolies with near-zero reading of docs, it was running just fine on a test system.

Anyone else have any first thoughts (other than licensing, etc)?

Rich

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