Author: Marc Billette

When reviewing the performance of some queries, it is sometimes useful to review the sessions statistics for each execution of the query. I had a situation that required to look at these stats so I could see why one query would run fast and sometimes much slower. I wrote a simple wrapper ksh shell script for the query. It saves the session statistics in a table before and after the execution of the query and then prints out the statistics in a pivot report. This turned out to be very handy to me and therefore I chose to share it with the world :)

In this post I show you how to get SQL strings transformed in a way that resembles the result of cursor_sharing.

How much memory does my Oracle instance use? How much memory do my database connections use? These are questions that can help with capacity planning of your server’s Physical and Virtual memory. There are several write ups out there on the web that attempt to address these questions. From what I could gather from them, there is only one truly good way to tell exactly how much memory is currently in use by an oracle instance, as well as the average memory usage for oracle dedicated connection processes. I explain it here.

I was asked, the other day, to automate the creation of a client’s weekly report, which is a pivot table of some aggregate data generated by a query. I’ve written a set of fairly simple PL/SQL code that handles this task in all versions of Oracle that supports associative nested VARRAYs (I have no clue when that started getting supported. It sure works great with 10g). Here is how my code works.

This has been discussed before by my colleague Paul Moen in his article on Oracle standby recovery rate monitoring, but I recently made a discovery that makes it easier to generate both statistics on log apply performance, and more useful stats too. First, let me say that this discovery is based on my observations and has not been verified with Oracle Support nor by any insider. If you know one who can confirm this, please ask him or her.

Yes, I know, this subject of detailed extent map of the datafiles is a rather old one, and a few different solutions have been provided by several professionals, including the famous Tom Kyte. But none of the answers I found did exactly what I wanted, and therefore, I chose to write my own solution. OEM does provide this, but for a price — the Tablespace Map is part of the Oracle Tuning Pack — and I like the free stuff and the extra flexibility I have using queries.

I chose to talk about a technique I used at a client’s site to report the topmost space-wasting objects in an Oracle database. I was looking for a way to detect these objects without having to run some expensive analyze statements or dbms_stats jobs. I found out that I can use the dbms_space package to do this. It worked very well for me and I’m sure lots of DBAs could use this technique too.