Exciting seminars in Dallas arena

If you live in Dallas area, there are two very important seminars coming up:

1. Tanel Poder is presenting his Advanced Oracle troubleshooting seminar on September 9-11, 2009. .
2. Jonathan Lewis presenting two day seminar cost based optimization and writing efficient SQL on Oct 28 and Oct 29 2009

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These two gentlemen needs no introduction. Tanel Poder is an expert in Oracle internals and Jonathan Lewis is a Guru in Cost based optimization and writing efficient SQL.

Tell them I sent ya 🙂

Update: I just heard from Tanel and he is unable to make it to Dallas this September. He is rescheduling his seminar and I can’t wait for his seminar. I will update this blog with his rescheduled dates.

Shared pool freelists (and durations)

My earlier blog about shared pool duration got an offline response from one of my reader:
” So, you say that durations aka mini-heaps have been introduced from 10g onwards. I have been using Steve Adams’ script shared_pool_free_lists.sql. Is that not accurate anymore?”

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Shared pool free lists

I have a great respect for Steve Adams . In many ways, he has been a great virtual mentor and his insights are so remarkable.

Coming back to the question, I have used Steve’s script before and it is applicable prior to Oracle version 9i. In 9i, sub-heaps were introduced. Further, shared pool durations were introduced in Oracle version 10g. So, his script may not be applicable from version 9i onwards. We will probe this further in this blog.

This is the problem with writing anything about internals stuff, they tend to change from version to version and In many cases, our work can become obsolete in future releases(including this blog!).

ORA-4031 and Shared Pool Duration

After reading my earlier post on shared pool A stroll through shared pool heap , one of my client contacted me with an interesting ORA-4031 issue. Client was getting ORA-4031 errors and shared pool size was over 4GB ( in a RAC environment). Client DBA queried v$sgastat to show that there is plenty of free memory in the shared pool. We researched the issue and it is worth blogging. Client DBA was confused as to how there can be ORA-4031 errors when the shared pool free memory is few GBs.

Heapdump Analysis

At this point, it is imperative to take heapdump in level 2 and Level 2 is for the shared pool heap dump. [ Please be warned that it is not advisable to take shared pool heap dumps excessively, as that itself can cause performance issue. During an offline conversation, Tanel Poder said that heapdump can freeze instance as his clients have experienced.]. This will create a trace file in user_dump_dest destination and that trace file is quite useful in analyzing the contents of shared pool heap. Tanel Poder has an excellent script heapdump_analyzer . I modified that script adding code for aggregation at hea, extent and type levels to debug this issue further and it is available as heapdump_dissect.ksh . ( with a special permission from Tanel to publish this script.)

Shared pool review

You can read much more about shared pool in my earlier blog entry posted above. Just as a cursory review, shared pool is split in to multiple sub heaps. In 10g, each of those sub heaps are divided in to even smaller sub heaps, let’s call it mini-heaps. For example, in this specific database, there are three sub heaps. Each of those sub heaps are further split in to four mini-heaps (1,0), (1,1), (1,2) and (1,3) each.

	sga heap(1,0)
	sga heap(1,1)
	sga heap(1,2)
	sga heap(1,3)

	sga heap(2,0)
	sga heap(2,1)
	sga heap(2,2)
	sga heap(2,3)

	sga heap(3,0)
	sga heap(3,1)
	sga heap(3,2)
	sga heap(3,3)