Search Results remove_event

Overview

CTX_OUTPUT is a PL/SQL package owned by the CTXSYS schema and shipped as part of the Oracle Text (formerly interMedia Text) option. Although it resides in the CTXSYS schema rather than in APPLSYS or APPS, in an Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.1 or 12.2.2 environment it becomes visible to EBS code through a public synonym and direct grants, allowing application modules to record and inspect the diagnostic output produced by Oracle Text index and query operations. The package's purpose is to manage logging, tracing, and query statistics for the text server: it lets a caller open a log file, route structured events into it, control whether the file is appended or overwritten, add or remove trace events, and query trace settings. This makes CTX_OUTPUT the primary observability interface for Oracle Text behaviour inside EBS, where text indexes underpin features such as attachments search, Oracle iRecruitment matching, and knowledge base and document search.

Key Procedures and Functions

The package exposes seventeen documented entry points. The logging family comprises START_LOG, END_LOG, LOGFILENAME, and LOGFILEOVERWRITE; together these open a log session, name the output file, define overwrite behaviour, and close the session. A parallel query-logging pair, START_QUERY_LOG and END_QUERY_LOG, targets query-time diagnostics specifically. Query statistics are governed by ENABLE_QUERY_STATS and DISABLE_QUERY_STATS, while LOGGING reports or sets the overall logging state.

Event and trace management is handled by ADD_EVENT and REMOVE_EVENT, which control which internal events are written to the log, and by ADD_TRACE, REMOVE_TRACE, RESET_TRACE, LOG_TRACES, and GET_TRACE_VALUE, which configure tracing and read back trace setting values. DUMPEDERRORS reports errors that the text server has accumulated. No parameter lists are documented in the ETRM record for these routines; callers should therefore reference the Oracle Text reference guide shipped with the database release rather than assuming a signature.

Tables Accessed

The ETRM dependency listing shows the package body referencing CTXSYS.DR$NUMTABLE and SYS.STANDARD. DR$NUMTABLE is an internal Oracle Text dictionary table used to map numeric tokens back to their original text values, and CTX_OUTPUT consults it when rendering diagnostic information. From an EBS perspective the package's only documented table access through APPS synonyms is PLITBLM, a PL/SQL internal table used for line buffering of output. No application data tables are read or written, which confirms that CTX_OUTPUT operates purely on the diagnostic side and does not modify customer business data.

Usage Notes

CTX_OUTPUT is referenced by ten packages spanning both the technical and application schemas, including AMV, APPLSYS, APPS, AR, CS, EGO, ICX, JTF, OKC, PA, and PUBLIC, as well as by internal Oracle Text packages such as DRVDDL, DRVDML, DRVUTL, DRIPARX, DRIXMD, and the DRVXTAB family, and by XDB.DBMS_XDBT. This breadth means the package is invoked implicitly during index synchronisation and optimiser runs rather than only from user-facing forms. In EBS practice it is most often called from custom concurrent programs or ad hoc SQL sessions when a DBA or developer needs to capture Oracle Text indexing behaviour for troubleshooting, for example by enabling START_LOG before a CTX_DDL.SYNC_INDEX call and reading the resulting file after END_LOG. Because it is a CTXSYS-owned object, custom code should invoke it through the public synonym and should avoid creating private redefinitions. Trace and query statistics should be enabled only for the duration of a diagnostic run, since the additional output carries a performance cost in a production EBS instance.