Archive for the ‘Oracle’ Category

Top Ways How Not To Scale Your Data Warehouse

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Working in the Real-World Performance Group at Oracle has allowed me to see quite a few customers' data warehouses. Unfortunately some customers find their data warehouse suffering from performance problems, not because there is a platform issue, but often because the features are not used or are not used ...

Choosing An Optimal Stats Gathering Strategy

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Recently the Oracle Optimizer Development Team put out a White Paper entitled Upgrading from Oracle Database 9i to 10g: What to expect from the Optimizer. This paper discusses the main differences between 9i and 10g in the subject area of the Optimizer and Statistics. As G.I. Joe ...

Awareness Test

Friday, March 21st, 2008

I came across this video the other day and I immediately thought of rule #3 from my Got Root Cause? post: "Be detail oriented, but do not become too obsessed with any one detail." Watch the video and see if you pass the Awareness Test. Most importantly, remember the punch line ...

There Is No Time Like ‘%NOW%’ To Use Dynamic Sampling

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

I recently came across a query in which the Optimizer was making a poor cardinality estimate, which in turn caused inefficient join type, which in turn caused the query to run excessively long. This post is a reenactment of my troubleshooting. The Suspect SQL The original SQL was quite large ...

ANSI Outer Joins And Lateral Views

Monday, February 18th, 2008

A few months ago the Oracle Optimizer Team did a blog post entitled Outerjoins in Oracle. In the Lateral View section of that post they go through some examples and discuss how a query is transformed with the ANSI outer join syntax. I thought it would be useful ...

Oracle 11g: Real-Time SQL Monitoring Using DBMS_SQLTUNE.REPORT_SQL_MONITOR

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Many times a DBA wants to know where a SQL statement is in its execution plan and where the time is being spent. There are a few ways to find out this information, but an 11g new feature makes gathering this information extremely easy. Oracle 11g Real-Time SQL Monitoring ...

What Are Your System Statistics?

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

I've been working on a few test cases and I'm in search of some real-world data. If your production Oracle database uses system statistics, either Workload Statistics or Noworkload Statistics, and you are willing to share them, please post a comment with the output from the following two ...

Oracle Myth Busting: Show, Don’t Tell

Sunday, December 16th, 2007

Richard Foote has recently started blogging (as of December 11th) and one of his recent posts discusses Oracle Myths and Information Pollution. I find this topic very interesting as I'm always amazed at the number of people who make changes to their production database based on the results from ...