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August 2007

Sqlplus is my second home, part 2: Running SQL scripts from remote locations using HTTP

Submitted by tanelpoder on Thu, 2007-08-30 17:11

As you probably already know, the Session Snapper has been designed to be a very easy-to-use performance tool. It is especially useful in database environments where there are no decent performance tools pre-installed and available.

Snapper doesn’t require any setup, all you need is to log on to the database using sqlplus and download snapper.sql script to your computer.

Well, actually the second part is not required, as Oracle sqlplus allows you to run scripts from http and ftp locations!

Operating systems are lazy allocating memory

Submitted by tanelpoder on Tue, 2007-08-28 16:02

There was a discussion about whether Oracle really allocates all memory for SGA immediately on instance startup or not. And further, whether Oracle allocates memory beyond the SGA_TARET if SGA_MAX_SIZE is larger than it.

It’s worth reading this thread first: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=535400&tstart=0

I will paste an edited version of my reply to here as well:

Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting Guide, Part 2: No magic is needed, systematic approach will do

Submitted by tanelpoder on Sun, 2007-08-26 18:40

There are two ways for diagnosing problems:

  1. Checking for usual suspects and hoping to find a matching one
  2. Following a systematic approach

Checking for usual suspects and hoping to find a matching one

Oracle Session Snapper, part 2: Getting most out of Snapper

Submitted by tanelpoder on Sun, 2007-08-26 05:02

The main design goal of Session Snapper was that it should not require any changes to be made into database.

And to achieve this goal, I was even willing to sacrifice some functionality.

So, for example there is no sorting capability in Snapper output. It would have been easy to create an SQL Type to database, use that as session statistics storage and query results out using an order by on statistics delta column – giving you (probably) most significant resource consumers first. But I didn’t do this as it would have violated the no-database-change-whatsoever design goal. (This problem could however be solved using manual sorting in PL/SQL code as done in Adrian Billington’s variation of runstats utility: http://www.oracle-developer.net/utilities.php )

Oracle 11g internals part 1: Automatic Memory Management

Submitted by tanelpoder on Mon, 2007-08-20 19:15

This is my attempt for getting cheap popularity out of recent Oracle 11g release. This is not going to be another Oracle 11g new features list, I’ll be just posting any of my research findings here, in a semi-organized way.

The first post is is about Automatic Memory Management. AMM manages all SGA + PGA memory together, allowing it to shift memory from SGA to PGAs and vice versa. You only need to set a MEMORY_TARGET (and if you like, MEMORY_MAX_TARGET parameter).

You can read rest of the general details from documentation, I will talk about how this feature has been implemented on OSD / OS level (or at least how it looks to be implemented).

Oracle Session Snapper – real-time session-level performance stats for DBAs

Submitted by tanelpoder on Sun, 2007-08-19 18:05

A post by Jonathan Lewis inspired me to finally complete my version of the Oracle session performance snapper script, which main characteristics are

  1. it reports Oracle session level performance counter and wait information in real time
  2. it does NOT require any database objects to be created

If you are a DBA or consultant working on ad-hoc performance issues, you will like it!

Are you familiar with following situation?

(Monday morning)

Customer: Hey, we need your help! We have serious performance issues in our production environment. It’s a database with x000 online users, several parallel data feeds, continuous batch jobs and reporting going on.

Users have started experiencing occasional bad performance and some batch jobs as well.

Sqlplus is my second home, Part 1: HTMLizing your sqlplus output

Submitted by tanelpoder on Tue, 2007-08-07 15:14

I have not managed to post anything for a while, but I intend to make it up by starting this series of posts made specially for Oracle enthusiasts, geeks and maniacs among us. Here I plan to post the coolest Oracle stuff I’ve just found out and some of it may actually be useful to you!

Lets start. This post is about removing the last major problem with sqlplus in everyday database and application administration work.

I would say the commnd line sqlplus, combined with its script execution and Windows cmd.exe’s command history navigation capabilities, is a very powerful and fast tool for database administration and troubleshooting. This is of course if you use a set of database administration scripts, either downloaded from some reliable source or accumulated over the years of working with Oracle ( you do have such scripts, right? ;-)