May 2013

I have just agreed a public class dates of my very popular " How to perform a security audit of an Oracle database " with Oracle University to be held on September 24th and 25th in Rome, Italy. The registration....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 30/05/13 At 05:54 PM

One of the most common Exadata performance problems I see is that the direct path reads (and thus also Smart Scans) don’t sometimes kick in when running full scans in serial sessions. This is because in Oracle 11g onwards, the serial full segment scan IO path decision is done dynamically, at runtime, for every SQL execution – and for every segment (partition) separately. Whether you get a direct path read & smart scan, depends on the current buffer cache size, how big segment you’re about to scan and how much of that segment is actually cached at the moment. Note that the automatic IO path decision for index fast full scans is slightly different from table scans.

One of the most common Exadata performance problems I see is that the direct path reads (and thus also Smart Scans) don’t sometimes kick in when running full scans in serial sessions. This is because in Oracle 11g onwards, the serial full segment scan IO path decision is done dynamically, at runtime, for every SQL execution – and for every segment (partition) separately. Whether you get a direct path read & smart scan, depends on the current buffer cache size, how big segment you’re about to scan and how much of that segment is actually cached at the moment. Note that the automatic IO path decision for index fast full scans is slightly different from table scans.

Here’s a live example demonstrating a point I’ve often made – you have to be very detailed in your hinting or Oracle will find a way to obey your hints and do the wrong thing.  A recent posting on the OTN database forum gave use the following query and execution plan: