title: Using ODBC Trace or Oracle Trace to find cause of error?
body: <p>I have a third party Windows service which controls/monitors equipment and updates an Oracle database.  Their services occasionally report an error about a row/column in the database being "bad" but do not give the underlying database error, and their services need to be restarted and everything is fine.  The current suspicion is that something from our applications/services which read/write to those same tables/rows are interfering - i.e. some kind of blocking/locking.  I suspect that there is some sort of leak in their system since it happens about once a week, but our systems never need any re-starting like this.</p>
  
  <p>I attempted to have the DBA run a trace run in Oracle (10g), but this managed to make our apps unable to access the Oracle database.  Our systems access Oracle in .NET, either using the Oracle ODP client or Microsoft client (older programs) and on this same server (either web apps or services) or from other control workstations.  The third-party services connects to Oracle via ODBC on this server.  I also attempted to run a ODBC trace (since that would only be activity from the third-party service), but didn't get anything in the trace file at all.</p>
  
  <p>So I'm trying to find a way to either get ODBC tracing working or what I need to look out for so that the Oracle trace doesn't kill my server.</p>
  
  <p>I'm looking for the undserlying error which Oracle is returning to the thrid-party service so I can tell if we are interfering with their access to the data in some way.</p>