bug

The patch set 11.2.0.3 includes a fix for bug# 10187168 which, in reality, is an enhancement request. Its purpose is to artificially limit the number of child cursors that a parent cursor can have. The concept is quite easy: when a parent cursor reaches _cursor_obsolete_threshold (default value is 100) child cursors the parent cursor is obsoleted and, as a result, a new one is created.

So, as of 11.2.0.3 (or with some PSUs and bundle patches), the answer to the question is: 100.

Here is an odd bug that can lead to some nasty side effects when using the EXCHANGE PARTITION technique. It is probably there for a very long time, simply because it depends on the usage of virtual columns, and the basic technique of virtual columns was introduced way back in the Oracle 8i times with the introduction of Function Based Indexes.

The problem isn't the exchange partition operation itself, but the accompanying swap of object statistics information, in particular the column statistics.

Look the following sequence of DDL and DML commands and pay then special attention to the output for the column statistics before and after the EXCHANGE PARTITION operation:

Extended SQL trace (a.k.a. debugging event 10046 at a level higher than 1) is one of the key features provided by Oracle to troubleshoot applications using Oracle Database. For many years the available levels were always the same (4, 8 and 12). In fact, since I wrote my first paper about it in May 2000 and the release of 11g nothing changed.

With 11g, as I described in this post, new levels (16 and 32) were introduced.

Usually the Cost-Based Optimizer arrives at a reasonable execution plan if it gets the estimates regarding cardinality and data scattering / clustering right (if you want to learn more about that why not watch my Webinar available at "AllThingsOracle.com"?).

Here is an example I've recently come across where this wasn't case - the optimizer obviously preferred plans with a significantly higher cost.

The setup to reproduce the issue is simple:

In the previous post I wrote about strangely behaving V$SQL. For some reason there were duplicate rows leading to wrong results issue when running DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY_CURSOR for a particular child cursor. I tried to reproduce the issue using simple test case – and it was reproduced.

Here it is. I’m starting to execute a simple query against DUAL while constantly changing optimizer environment, forcing Oracle to build a new child cursor for each execution:

Here is an odd little bug that was discussed a couple of weeks ago on the OTN forums.

It's about queries on join views by ROWID that fail with "ORA-01410: invalid ROWID" under certain circumstances. The bug can only be reproduced when using the 11.2 code base. In fact the same setup will cause an internal error in 11.1, but 10.2 will return correct results.

It's probably not a very common scenario but it is an interesting example of how features that work fine by themselves can cause problems when used together.

First of all (hopefully) some of you may ask: How is it possible to query from a join view by ROWID, since the view is based on multiple objects and hence doesn't have a simple one-to-one mapping to a ROWID of a single table?

Most execution plans can be interpreted by following few basic rules (in TOP, Chapter 6, I provide such a list of rules). Nevertheless, there are some special cases. One of them is when an index scan, in addition to the access predicate, has a filter predicate applying a subquery.

The following execution plan, taken from Enterprise Manager 11.2, is an example (click on the image to increase its size):

Notes:

In a recent OTN thread I've been reminded of two facts about Dynamic Sampling that I already knew but had forgotten in the meantime:

1. The table level dynamic sampling hint uses a different number of blocks for sampling than the session / cursor level dynamic sampling. So even if for both for example level 5 gets used the number of sampled blocks will be different for most of the 10 levels available (obviously level 0 and 10 are exceptions)

2. The Dynamic Sampling code uses a different approach for partitioned objects if it is faced with the situation that there are more partitions than blocks to sample according to the level (and type table/cursor/session) of Dynamic Sampling

Note that all this here applies to the case where no statistics have been gathered for the table - I don't cover the case when Dynamic Sampling gets used on top of existing statistics.

We’ve now received a response to the issue described in the previous entry. In short oui updates at install time are broken (apparently fixed in 11.2.0.3, but no updates are available for that release yet to check. Hi , The OUI looks for the metadata for the patches. There is an unpublished bug 11709996 on [...]

One of the nice new features of the 11.2 installer for the Database (and indeed the installer for Enterprise Manager 12c) is the ability to tell the setup software to download any post release recommended updates for the product and to apply them at install time. The installer first of all prompts you for your [...]