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Congrats on v1.5, because I think it finally has all thre required (minimum) functionality to be a really great product.

I'm almost done converting the ILO design to another language, called ILV for Instrumentation Library for VBA. The purpose is to add trace and timing information to advanced MS Excel Spreadsheet VBA subroutines and functions. I'm running into issues that may require more ILO features. Same issues might apply to converting ILO to other languages, e.g. ILJ, ILASP, ???. Can we discuss here - so we can all get feedback?

1) Currently, the "client" applications create trace files as text, disconnected at runtime from the DB, but the boss wants to merge the application trace files with ILO trace information. I've kept almost exactly the same formats, e.g. TIMESTAMP in VBA, etc. and the same functionality. Trace file (text) loads could be a batch load, after runtime, and I'd probably like to load them into a DB table.

2) When the "client" application connects to the DB, running requests as (a) SQL queries or (b) PL/SQL procs (maybe returning open refcursors), I need to come up with the "best" way to "wrap" these requests, and integrate with ILO. Two ways possible to wrap - either separately in client trace file or integrated with ILO begin task. Have you considered how to effeciently wrap a client application task calling SQL query with ILO functionality? Which way do you think might be easier to integrate with ILO trace info? How to effeciently wrap by minimizing round trips?

3) At some point, we'll need standardized reports for parsing the combined trace files. Report types include (a) trace of what happened, (b) runtimes with action weights sorted by longest %task-time and frequency, (c) summary of which client id did what actions, (d) summary of actions with task-time and frequency.

4) Do you have any further suggestions or questions regarding what I'm attempting to accomplish?

Thanks again! ILO version 1.5 is really great, and the runtime addon from SLA Manager is ingeneous, too.

Michael,

Thanks for the feedback and the very interesting topic. I'm going to be giving this some thought and discussing it with some other internal folks so that the answers we give are thorough and thought out, not just gut reactions.

Please watch this space in the next few days for our answers.