Oracle General

I’m please to announce that both of my highly acclaimed webinars scheduled for February are now confirmed. These webinars are a must for any Oracle DBA or Developer interested in designing, developing or maintaining high performance, highly scalable Oracle-based applications or databases. However only a few places are currently available on each webinar with numbers […]

In my first post on Automatic Indexing on Partitioned Tables, I discussed how Automatic Indexing (AI) can now create a Non-Partitioned index if deemed the most effective indexing structure (this wasn’t supported when AI was initially released). A Non-Partitioned index is indeed likely the most efficient indexing structure if the underlying table has many partitions […]

  Firstly, thank you for all those who contacted me regarding the issue with Oracle Automatic Indexing (AI) having stopped working within the Autonomous ATP Database Cloud service. It appears this issue was indeed widely spread and impacted numerous (if not all) Autonomous ATP Database Cloud services. This was all possibly due to (unpublished) bug […]

In this little series, I’m going to discuss how Automatic Indexing works in relation to Partitioning. I’ve discussed Indexing and Partitioning many times previously and how Oracle has various options when indexing a partitioned table: Non-Partitioned Index Globally Partitioned Index Locally Partitioned Index So the question(s) are how does Automatic Indexing handle scenarios with partitioned […]

In Part I of this series, we saw how Automatic Indexing will not create a viable Automatic Index if there are stale or missing statistics on the underlining segments. In Part II we saw how these SQL statements effectively become blacklisted and when segment statistics are subsequently collected, Automatic Indexing will still not create viable […]

    In my previous post, I discussed how having stale statistics, usually a bad idea, is especially problematic with regard Automatic Indexes as it usually results in viable automatic indexes only being created in an UNUSABLE/INVISIBLE state. If we were to now to collect the missing statistics:   If we now repeatedly re-run the […]

A “golden rule” when working with Automatic Indexing is that things don’t work properly if there are stale statistics on the dependant objects. Stale statistics can of course be problematic but they can be particularly troublesome when dealing with Automatic Indexing. In the Oracle Autonomous Database environments, this issue is addressed somewhat by the new […]

  In my previous post, I discussed how the Automatic Indexing task by using Dynamic Sampling Level=11 can correctly determine the correct query cardinality estimates and assume the CBO will likewise determine the correct cardinality estimate and NOT use an index if it would cause performance to regress. However, if other database sessions DON’T use […]

In my previous few blog posts, I’ve been discussing some issues in relation to how Automatic Indexes handle SQL statements that accesses skewed data. In this post, I’m going to setup the scenario in which Automatic Indexing can potentially use Baselines to help address some of these issues. BUT, as we’ll see, I’m having to […]

Following on from my previous few posts on “data skew”, I’m now going to look at it from a slightly different perspective, where there is an inherent relationship between columns. The CBO has difficulties in recognising (by default) that some combinations of column values are far more common than other combinations, resulting in incorrect cardinality […]