stacktrace backtrace internals

In order to look how Exadata smartscans are different, first let’s have a peek the Oracle full segment/multiblock read evolution as short as possible:

a) Traditional multiblock reads, visible via the event ‘db file scattered read’
The essence is: Multiple adjacent blocks are read from disk, and put in the buffercache. Because every read is sequentially processed, IO latency is a performance penalty for every physical read. This works roughly this way: get a set of adjacent blocks from the segment header, fetch these blocks from disk, process these blocks, then get the next set of adjacent blocks, fetch these blocks from disk, process these blocks, etc.