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12.4 Dynamic Tracing

PostgreSQL provides facilities to support dynamic tracing of the database server. This allows an external utility to be called at specific points in the code and thereby trace execution. Currently, this facility is primarily intended for use by database developers, as it requires substantial familiarity with the code.

A number of trace points, often called probes, are already inserted into the source code. By default these probes are disabled, and the user needs to explicitly tell the configure script to make the probes available in PostgreSQL.

Currently, only the DTrace utility is supported, which is only available on Solaris Express and Solaris 10+. It is expected that DTrace will be available in the future on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. Supporting other dynamic tracing utilities is theoretically possible by changing the definitions for the PG_TRACE macros in ‘src/include/pg_trace.h’.