Presents your 
JAVA E-NEWSLETTER for December 12, 2002

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SNOOP ON SQL STATEMENTS WITH P6LOG

JDBC's PreparedStatement class is very powerful, but it can be a pain
sometimes--especially when dealing with error messages. The prepared
statement will handle the type conversion, so how will you know what 
formatting error occurred?

The solution is to listen to the SQL statements as they are sent to 
your driver using P6Spy's P6Log.

Installing P6Spy into a simple environment involves getting the Zip file
from the Web site and then editing the spy.properties file to include
the database driver you currently use.

Next you put the spy.properties file and p6spy.jar in your classpath.
Then you change the database code to point to
"com.p6spy.engine.spy.P6SpyDriver" rather the name of your real driver. 
The database URL and all other
code remains the same.

When you run your code, a spy.log file will be created containing the
SQL statements that were run by the system. For example:

1028592292236|57|0|statement|SELECT * FROM user where user=?|
SELECT * FROM user where user='root'

This is the output when a prepared statement is run to find out the
details for the root user in MySQL.

A spy.log file and some scripting can create a nice report of which
statements are run most often and which arguments are most common.

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