Abstract: Techniques are provided to analyze software applications, and in particular, to obtain visibility to the execution of a database application. As the software application issues requests to a database, the system determines based on a first set of programmable parameters whether the requests are of a type to trigger data collection. If so, a second set of programmable parameters are utilized to determine which data, if any, to collect for one or more sub-portions of the request. In one embodiment, the sub-portions are commands recognized by a database management system. Collected data is used to generate visual and textual models of the application.