> are good at different things Exactly. What are the available debugging tools, and what are their pros and cons? That's a much more fruitful question. Today

> are good at different things Exactly. What are the available debugging tools, and what are their pros and cons? That's a much more fruitful question. Today I had to investigate a bug in a C program. With a conditional breakpoint in gdb I could spot the problem and devise a solution in a matter of minutes. When I'm debugging SQL (which happens frequently), that depends. If the query is light, I often use a "Prolog-like" approach: make the expression more general until I find the clauses responsible for the bug. On the other hand, if the query is too heavy, I consider spending some time reading the expression very carefully to see if I can find the issue without incurring in a costly execution. It all boils down to what sorts of problems you have, and which of the available solutions will be more appropriate.