Join Steven and Chris as we hear from our special guest, Shashank Barki, on his experience using PL/SQL profilers (DBMS_PROFILER and DBMS_HPROF) to identify bottlenecks in PL/SQL code. Shashank is a Senior Principal Data Engineer at Manhattan Associates. He has 13 years experience as a developer, cloud architect and data analyst. In each of his jobs, he has promoted the use of PL/SQL to improve the performance, security and maintainability of their applications.

DBMS_PROFILER is the name of the package that provides an API to the profiler that computes the time that your PL/SQL program spends at each line, in each subprogram. Saves runtime statistics in database tables, which you can then query.

DBMS_HPROF is the hierarchical profiler; this utility reports the dynamic execution program profile of your PL/SQL program, organized by subprogram invocations. It accounts for SQL and PL/SQL execution times separately. Requiring no special source or compile-time preparation, it generates reports in HTML. You can also store profiler data and results in relational format in database tables for custom report generation (such as third-party tools offer).