I've had the privilege of presenting at Oracle conferences before, but it's not an easy process to first get approved. I've been denied (many) more times than approved.

So in the spirit of sharing disappointments, I'll go first. This was a session proposal I submitted for the IOUG Collaborate conference:

TITLE

Beyond the Backtrace: Using UTL_CALL_STACK for Easy PL/SQL Instrumentation

ABSTRACT

There are several open source libraries available for PL/SQL developers to easily instrument their code inside Oracle Database. Frameworks like ILO, Logger, and BMC_DEBUG are robust and stable offerings to get developers started with instrumentation. A common drawback in these libraries is their requirement to support older versions of Oracle, and thus don't take advantage of the new (in Oracle 12.1) package UTL_CALL_STACK.

The UTL_CALL_STACK package provides access to the Oracle stack that PL/SQL developers had to previously come up with clever workarounds to gain access to. This new API allows developers to easily know exactly where they are and where they were in the call stack, thus providing a way to wrap instrumentation code with calls to DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO and DBMS_MONITOR or DBMS_SYSTEM if needed.

In this session Mikey Sanchez will review the advantages of and ways to implement PL/SQL instrumentation in Oracle Database. A simple framework for utilizing UTL_CALL_STACK will be presented to make instrumenting existing PL/SQL code easy. He will also provide tips on how to use the UTL_CALL_STACK package to provide more insights than simple backtraces during exceptions.