Under very rare circumstances, I need Oracle SQL trace files from a long period of time. Because trace files usually grow large—especially over several days—there is the need to rotate the trace file during that time so that they can be compressed and put away. The problem is that there is no “rotate tracefile“ button in Oracle. However, I have found a “undocumented feature“ that does exactly that—without disabling tracing.
My procedure uses the close_trace call of oradebug. This call closes the currently written trace file for a session. Alex Gorbachev has used this to delete big trace files that are still open. My procedure goes a little bit further and exposes one more side effect of oradebug close_trace.
