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13.4 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.

A number of probes or trace points are already inserted into the source code. These probes are intended to be used by database developers and administrators. By default the probes are not compiled into PostgreSQL; the user needs to explicitly tell the configure script to make the probes available.

Currently, only the DTrace utility is supported, which is available on OpenSolaris, Solaris 10, and Mac OS X Leopard. It is expected that DTrace will be available in the future on FreeBSD and possibly other operating systems. The SystemTap project for Linux also provides a DTrace equivalent. Supporting other dynamic tracing utilities is theoretically possible by changing the definitions for the macros in ‘src/include/utils/probes.h’.