After my AWR Warehouse session at DOAG in Nuremberg, Germany last week, an attendee asked me if he really needed to use trace files anymore with the value provided by AWR, (Automatic Workload Repository) and ASH, (Active Session History.)  I responded that trace files were incredibly valuable and should never be discounted. To use an analogy, when I was 22 years old, and entered a doctor’s office missing a small percentage of my visual field after an apparent migraine, doctors used a number of different “tools” at their disposal in an attempt to diagnose what had happened.  They first started…