AWR Snapshots

A couple of days ago I mentioned as a passing comment that you could take AWR snapshots at the start and end of the overnight batch processing so that if you ever had to answer the question: “Why did last night’s batch overrun by two hours?” you had the option of creating and comparing the AWR report from the latest batch run with the report from a previous batch run (perhaps the corresponding night the previous week) and check for any significant differences. Moreover, Oracle supplies you with the code to compare and report such differences from 10.2 (at least) using the script $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/awrddrpt.sql

The thing I didn’t mention at the time was how to take a snapshot on demand. It’s very easy if you have the appropriate execute privilege on package dbms_workload_repository.

execute dbms_workload_repository.create_snapshot('TYPICAL');

The single input parameter can be ‘TYPICAL’ (the default) or ‘ALL’.

I keep this one liner in a little script called awr_launch.sql – because I can never remember the exact name of the package without looking it up. (And sometimes I run it with sql_trace enabled so that I can see how much work goes into a snapshot as we change versions, features, configuration, workload and platforms.)