V$iews

Oracle, as any other DBs, has got a Catalog: internal tables and views that give you information about tables, users, sessions and so on.

One subset is the v$ views (v$iews for short) subset.

V$iews are dynamic views used to track down performance problems.

A little example:

your PL/SQL program seems to be stuck on a query.

you can:

1) select * from v$session

this view tells you about sessions (aka connections to your Oracle instance). Find out the session id (sid) you are interested (this can be a bit hard…)

2)Select * From v$sqltext,v$session
where ADDRESS = sql_ADDRESS
and HASH_VALUE = sql_HASH_VALUE
and sid= <your_sid>
order by piece

the result is the query actually in execution and probably the one that’s generating the problem.

Bye!