Performance tuning

A new version 2.0 of the XPLAN_ASH utility introduced here is available for download.You can download the latest version here.The change log tracks the following changes:- Access check- Conditional compilation for different database versions- Additional activity summary- Concurrent activity information (what is/was going on at the same time)- Experimental stuff: Additional I/O summary- More pretty printing- Experimental stuff: I/O added to Average Active Session Graph (renamed to Activity Timeline)- Top Execution Plan Lines and Top Activities added to Activity Timeline- Activity Timeline is now also shown for serial execution when TIMELINE option is specified- From 11.2.0.2 on: We get the ACTUAL DOP from the undocumented PX_FLAGS colu

Please join us at the DOUG (DALLAS ORACLE USERS GROUP) Oracle Database Forum meeting on Thursday, October 25, 2012 from 5 pm – 7 pm.
Presented by Riyaj Shamsudeen, OraInternals, & Sahil Thapar:

“Out with the old way, Enter dbms_xplan: A Swiss army knife for performance engineers”

Rough outline:
(i) Ability to query access path from memory, AWR repository
(ii) Ability to use cardinality feedback method to understand access plan issues. Few tips from a real world experience will be provided too.
(iii) Ability to understand issues with database links etc.
(iv) Options such as ADVANCED, ALLSTATS etc
(v) Why should you choose dbmx_xplan over tkprof+sql_trace combination?
(vi) Disadvantages of dbms_xplan and a quick introduction to dbms_monitor.

Refreshments sponsored by me :)

One of the most useful information that the Oracle kernel attaches to plans in the library cache are measures of various resource consumption figures, such as elapsed time, consistent and current gets, disk reads, etcetera. These can be made available for each plan line (aka "row source operation").

These figures are always cumulative, that is, include both the resource consumed by the line itself and all of its progeny. It is very often extremely useful to exclude the progeny from the measure, to get what we could name the "self" figure (following, of course, the terminology introduced by Cary Millsap and Jeff Holt in their famous book Optimizing Oracle Performance).

Just a quick note, I will be presenting on “Truss, pstack, pmap, and more” talking about advanced UNIX utilities and how it can be utilized to understand inner working of an application or even Oracle Database Engine.

My timeslot is between 2:15 and 3:15 in Room 2016.

http://blogs.ioug.org/2012/08/15/ioug-at-oracle-openworld-2012-the-sunday-technical-sessions-9302012/

Uploading presentation files. Thanks for attending at OOW12.
pstack_truss_etc

Preface

Note: This blog post actually serves three purposes:

1. It introduces and describes my latest contribution to the Oracle Community,  the "XPLAN_ASH" tool

Table Of Contents

Introduction

Real-Time SQL Monitoring Overview

Real-Time SQL Monitoring Shortcomings

Quick note about Jonathan Lewis trip to Dallas: Jonathan Lewis will be presenting two day seminar on two topics, “Beating the Oracle Optimizer” (June 28) and “Troubleshooting and tuning” (June 29th).

The event will be held June 28-29, 2012 at SMU-in-Legacy in Plano, TX.

This is a must-attend event for experienced DBAs and Developers. Especially, if you are planning to upgrade your database/application in the near-future or if you are in the middle of an upgrade, you must attend these two seminars. This seminar series provide enormous value resolving complex Production performance issues.

Click Here for details.

This is a quick note about reverse path filtering and impact of that feature to RAC. I encountered an interesting problem recently with a client and it is worth blogging about it, with a strong hope that it might help one of you in the future.

Problem

Environment is 11.2.0.2 GI, Linux 5.6. In a 3 node cluster, Grid Infrastructure (GI) comes up cleanly in just one node, but never comes up in other nodes. If we shutdown GI in first node, we can start the GI in second node with no issues. Meaning, GI can be up in just one node at any time.

System Admins indicated that there are no major changes, only few bug fixes. Seemingly, problem started after those bug fixes. But there were few other changes to the environment /init.ora parameter change etc. So, the problem was not immediately attributable to just OS changes.

Analysis

Let’s first discuss how RAC traffic works before continuing. Environment for the discussion is: 2 node cluster with 8K database block size, UDP protocol is used for cache fusion. (BTW, UDP and RDS protocols are supported in UNIX platform; whereas Windows uses TCP protocol).

UDP protocol, fragmentation, and assembly

UDP Protocol is an higher level protocol stack, and it is implemented over IP Protocol ( UDP/IP). Cache Fusion uses UDP protocol to send packets over the wire (Exadata uses RDS protocol though).

We know that database blocks are transferred between the nodes through the interconnect, aka cache fusion traffic. Common misconception is that packet transfer size is always database block size for block transfer (Of course, messages are smaller in size). That’s not entirely true. There is an optimization in the cache fusion code to reduce the packet size (and so reduces the bits transferred over the private network). Don’t confuse this note with Jumbo frames and MTU size, this note is independent of MTU setting.

If you are attending Collaborate 2012, you might be interested in my content-rich sessions below :

Session Number: 326
Session Title: SCAN, VIP, HAIP, and other RAC acronyms
Session Date/Time/Room: Tue, Apr 24, 2012 (10:45 AM – 11:45 AM) : Surf C

Session Number: 327
Session Title: Internals and Performance Boot Camp: Truss, pstack, pmap, and more
Session Date/Time/Room: Wed, Apr 25, 2012 (03:00 PM – 04:00 PM) : Palm A

Hope to see you there!

Update: I am uploading presentation files. Presentations are much more recent than the document