Dear Fellowship of the TOAD,
I used custom charts in the AWR/Statspack Browser a lot, now recently I ran the browser in a RAC environment, where there's more than one value for a metric for a given snapshot. In fact, it's one value per instance. Now I need to find out how to adapt my charts to still make sense in a RAC.
TOAD's own charts are aware of the instance id. You can choose the instance from a drop-down list at the top of the browser window and then the chart data is queried only for the chosen instance number. TOAD's very own SQL Tracker shows that the predicate "AND instance_number = <n>" is added to the query, so there should be an according placeholder defined somewhere.
But, there seems to be no documentation of the custom chart feature aside from the short hints in the dialog windows. And these only mention "&Snapshotlist" as a placeholder for the snapshots. What I need is a **placeholder like "&Instance_number"**- so I fiddled around a bit with guesswork, but to no avail.
Does anyone here know about such a variable/placeholder?
Cheers, Uwe
Hi Uwe,
There is no way to do make the AWR/Statspack browser automatically adjust your custom queries to the currently selected RAC instance, unfortunately. The best thing that I can suggest is that you change your queries so that they only query against the current instance, and then you can connect to the instance that you are interested in.
To do that, you could add “where inst_id = (select instance_number from v$instance)”
Thanks for the info John - even though it’s bad news.
Currently, I already use the where clause you suggested. But these reports will be used by other, not so experienced admins, too, so I was hoping for more usability (or better: consistent behaviour across all charts).
Guess I’ll head over to the idea pond…
Cheers,
Uwe
No need to go to Idea pond. I’ll try to come up with a way to add this functionality. Would you mind sending me your StatsPackcharts.ini file? You can send it to john.dorlon@quest.com.
Starting in the next beta, you can use an &InstanceID variable to your queries. It will work for both RAC and non-RAC.
Wow, that was lightning fast!
Now I’m chomping at the bit until the next Beta is out.
Cheers,
Uwe
We strive for lightning-fast around here. 
By the way, I am interested in seeing what custom charts you came up with. Would you mind sending them to me directly so I could possibly ? They are stored in a file called AWRCharts.ini (for AWR Browser) or StatspackCharts.ini (for StatsPackBrowser).
John.dorlon@quest.com.
John,
I already sent you a private answer to the email address you gave me. In case you didn’t get my reply, please check your Spam filter.
I’ll gladly provide you with my *Charts.ini the next time I’m on my TOAD workstation - I’m convinced there’s room for improvement with the default charts, but that’s a separate topic…
Cheers,
Uwe
Hi John,
it took a while to get an upgraded license key… now finally, I am able to confirm that the new “&InstanceID” works like a charm!
Cheers,
Uwe