Sometimes you need to dig deeper than Oracle allows you to see. This can be in the case of internal errors (ORA-600/ORA-7445), but also if you want to truly understand what is going on. This is where GDB, the GNU debugger comes in. With GDB, you can profile the Oracle executable at the C-function level. As with anything, digging deeper comes at a cost. In order to use GDB you have to understand how a C is executed and program works in Linux.
This is where this session is about: to give the attendee a brief introduction into how C/C++ programs work, and why GDB can be used, despite debugging symbols (what makes debugging happening) not being available for the Oracle executable, and give some basic recipes to certain use cases.