statistics

One of the difficulties of being a DBA and being required to solve performance problems is that you probably never have enough time to think about how you got to a solution and why the solution works; and if you don’t learn about the process itself , you just don’t get better at it. That’s why I try (at least some of the time) to write articles and books (as I did with CBO Fundamentals) that

If you want to examine historic object stats Oracle gives you a few procedures in the dbms_stats package to compare sets of stats captured at two different time periods, but there’s no view that you can query to get an idea of how a table’s stats have changed over time. This is a problem that can be addressed when you discover two things:

• There are views to report pending table, index, column and histogram stats.
• Pending stats are stored stored as “historic” stats with a future date.

Once you’ve spotted the second detail, you can acquire the SQL to generate the pending stats views:

Here’s another little note on the clustering_factor for an index and the table preference table_cached_blocks that can be set with a call to dbms_stats.set_table_prefs(). I might be repeating a point that someone made in a comment on an older posting but if that’s the case I can’t find the comment at present, and it’s worth its own posting anyway.

I gave this presentation to UKOUG PeopleSoft Roadshow 2018

PeopleSoft presents some special challenges when it comes to collecting and maintaining the object statistics used by the cost-based optimizer.

I’ve been prompted by a recent question on the ODC database forum to revisit a note I wrote nearly five years ago about bitmap join indexes and their failure to help with join cardinalities. At the time I made a couple of unsupported claims and suggestions without supplying any justification or proof. Today’s article finally fills that gap.

No-one should be using exp/imp to export and import data any more, they should be using the datapump equivalents expdp/impdp – but if you’re on an older (pre-12c) version of Oracle and still using exp/imp to do things like moving tables with their production statistics over to test systems then be careful that you don’t fall into an obsolescence trap when you finally upgrade to 12c (or Oracle 18).

exp/imp will mess up some of your histograms if you’re still using them to move tables/statistics in 12c.

There’s a question on the ODC database forum about column groups that throws up an interesting side point. The OP is looking at a query like the following and asking about which column groups might help the optimizer get the best plan:

Here is a little script I use from time to time to look at V$MYSTAT values and displaying on one line a set of statistics with their delta value between two calls.

The first script, _mystat_init.sql, initializes the variables. The second one displays the values, such as:

SQL> @ _mystat_diff.sql
 
db block changes redo size undo change vector size redo entries
---------------- ---------------- ----------------------- ----------------
57,371 15,445,852 6,111,608 37,709


Have you ever seen a result like this:

SQL> select sql_id, count(*) from V$sql group by sql_id having count(*) > 1000;

SQL_ID		COUNT(*)
------------- ----------
1dbzmt8gpg8x7	   30516

A client of mine who had recently upgraded to 12.2.0.1 RAC, using DRCP (database resident connection pooling) for an application using PHP was seeing exactly this type of behaviour for a small number of very simple SQL statements and wanted to find out what was going on because they were also seeing an undesirable level of contention in the library cache when the system load increased.

In this note I just want to highlight a particular detail of their problem – with an example – showing how easily histograms can introduce problems if you don’t keep an eye out for the dangers.

One of their queries really was as simple as this:

I had a sudden urge to go a bit meta – so here’s a relative frequency histogram of my observations of the general use of histograms in Oracle: