Product Announcement: MR Tools 2.0
Essential utilities for Oracle Developers and DBAs who care about performance

Greetings,

Recently my team at Method R Corporation released version 2 of the suite of software utilities that we use in every performance analysis job we do. It’s called MR Tools, and it’s available at our online store, priced beginning at US$397.

Our customers are loving what they see. Alex Gorbachev, CTO of Pythian, posted a very nice story about us at the Pythian blog that describes MR Tools as an all-in-one ETL + BI solution for trace files. Kyle Hailey has also posted a great review of our software at dboptimizer.com.

MR Tools makes working with Oracle trace data fast and easy. If you ever use trace data (and you should, because it’s the most detailed, most accurate, and easiest-to-understand performance data that the Oracle Database offers), then you owe it to yourself to have a look at MR Tools 2.0. It’s the perfect companion for our Method R Profiler or Oracle’s tkprof. Here are a few of the things that MR Tools can help you do:

• mrls lets you dive into a huge directory of thousands of trace files. Which file accounts for the most response time? The biggest LIO count? Which file accounts for the most rows processed? mrls can show you.
• mrskew is a profiler, a data miner, and a needle-finder for your haystacks. With it, you learn more about your response time than with any other tool. mrskew is a truly general-purpose data mining tool that lets you drill deep into any of dozens of analysis dimensions, like hot module/action combinations, hot latch addresses, hot data files or data blocks, hot SQL statements, and much more. There’s an excellent list of helpful mrskew queries at Karl Arao’s TiddlyWiki that will give you some ideas.
• Collecting trace data that exactly matches a specific end-user experience can be difficult. mrcallrm is a trace file cropping tool that lets you remove the parts of your trace data that you don’t want to include in your analysis, without harming the integrity of your trace file. It’s harder work than it sounds. mrcallrm makes it simple.
• There’s even an Oracle tim value calculator called mrtim that lets you join from Oracle trace data back into Oracle Active Session History (ASH) data, by telling you what time it is on any trace file line you happen to be looking at.

Finally, I’ve just scheduled our first “Mastering Oracle Trace Data” 1-day course to be held August 23 in Southlake, Texas. In this course, I’ll show you how to get the most out of your trace data with MR Tools. Course participants receive a limited license for MR Tools and MR Trace, an exclusive T-shirt, and discount opportunities for Method R software.

I hope you’ll have a look.

Sincerely,