If you have errors in your application code or in stored procedures, triggers, functions, or events, it can be useful to examine all statements executed by the database server that relate to the incorrect code. For applications that dynamically generate SQL, you can examine the actual text seen by the database server to detect errors in how the SQL text is built by the application. Such errors may cause queries to fail to be executed, or may return different results than the query was intended to return. For example, during development, your application may occasionally report that a SQL syntax error was encountered, but your application may not be instrumented to report the SQL text of the query that failed. If you have a trace taken when the application was run, you can search for statements that returned syntax (or other) errors, and see the exact text that was generated by your application.

For internal database objects such as procedures and triggers, you can use the debugger in Sybase Central. However, there may be times when it is more effective to cause the database server to trace all statements executed by a given procedure, and then examine these statements using the application profiling tool. For example, a given stored procedure may be returning an incorrect result once out of every 1000 invocations, but you may not understand under what conditions it fails. Rather than step through the procedure code 1000 times in the debugger, you could turn on diagnostic tracing for that procedure and run your application. Then, you could examine the set of statements that the database server executed, locate the set of statements that correspond to the incorrect execution of the procedure, and determine either why the procedure failed, or the conditions under which it behaves unexpectedly. If you know under what conditions the procedure behaves unexpectedly, you can set a breakpoint in the procedure and investigate further with the debugger. See Debugging procedures, functions, triggers, and events.