I regularly use the system-level activity chart available in Enterprise Manager. In my opinion it is a simple and effective way to know how much a specific database is loaded at a specific time. This is for example an interesting way for observing how a specific load is processed (see this post for an example). […]
Recently I had to analyse a row lock contention problem that can be illustrated by the following test case: A session (let’s call it #1) creates a table and inserts a row into it (note that “n” is the primary key of the table): SQL> CREATE TABLE t (n NUMBER PRIMARY KEY); SQL> VARIABLE n […]
Recently I was involved in a project where I had to trace the database calls of an application based on Oracle Portal 10.1.4. The basic requirements were the following: Tracing takes place in the production environment Tracing has to be enable for a single user only Instrumentation code cannot be added to the application Given […]
A reader of this blog, Paresh, asked me how I was able to find out the logic behind ITL waits without having access to Oracle code. My reply was: I wrote a test case that reproduce ITL waits and a piece of code that monitors them. Since other readers might be interested, here is the […]
In recent releases Oracle has silently changed the behavior of ITL waits. The aim of this post it to describe what has changed and why. But, first of all, let’s review some essential concepts about ITLs and ITL waits. Interested Transaction List The Oracle database engine locks the data modified by a transaction at the […]
At page 383 of my book I wrote the following sentence (BTW, the same information is also provided by Table 9-3 at page 381): With B-tree indexes, IS NULL conditions can be applied only through composite B-tree indexes when several SQL conditions are applied and at least one of them is not based on IS […]
Even though in general parallel full table scans performs direct reads, some exceptions exist. The aim of this post is to show such an exception. For test purposes I build in my own schema a copy of the SH.SALES table (the one distributed by Oracle with the demo schemas…). On that table I build an […]
When two tables are equi-partitioned on their join keys, the query optimizer is able to take advantage of partition-wise joins. To make sure that the tables are equi-partitioned, as of Oracle Database 11g reference partitioning can be used. In fact, per definition, with reference partitioning all “related” tables have exactly the same partitioning schema. If […]
The aim of this post is to describe a strange (buggy) situation that I observed recently. But before doing that, I shortly summarize what a parent cursor and a child cursor are as well as when they can be shared. By the way, I borrowed this description from the pages 20/21 of my book. Hence, […]
Almost one year ago Iggy Fernandez asked me to write a short text for the Ask the Oracles column of the NoCOUG Journal. The topic was “Bind Variable Peeking: Bane or Boon?”. My text along with the ones of Wolfgang Breitling, Dan Tow and Jonathan Lewis were published in the August issue. For some (unknown) […]