System Stats

A quick collation – and warning – for 11.2

• MOS (Metalink): Bug 9842771 - Wrong SREADTIM and MREADTIM statistics in AUX_STATS$ [ID 9842771.8] (needs MOS account)
• Comment from Sokrates in a Charles Hooper blog
• Blog item by Christian Antognini
• Blog item by Randolf Geist

Bottom line – be careful about what you do with system stats on 11.2

Footnote: the MOS link is a search string  producing a list of references. I set it up like that because one of the articles referencing the bug is called “Things to consider before upgrade to 11.2.0.2″ and it’s worth reading.

Addendum: one of the people on the two-day course I’ve just run in Berlin sent me a link for a quick note on how to set your own values for the system stats if you hit this bug. It’s actually quite a reasonable thing to do whether or not you hit the bug given the way that gathering the stats can produce unsuitable figures anyway:  setting system stats. (I’ve also added their company blog to the links on the right, they have a number interesting items and post fairly regularly.)

I wrote an article about system statistics / CPU Costing for Oracle magazine a few years ago – and last week I realised that I’ve never supplied a link to it in the notes and comments I’ve made about system statistics. So I’ve just run a search through the Oracle website trying to find it – and discovered that it’s no longer available. Apparently the editors have decided that any technical articles over a certain age should be withdrawn in case they are out of date and misleading. (Clearly they’ve read my blog on trust – I wish the people maintaining Metalink would do the same as the magazine editors – but they probably have a much larger volume to worry about).

However, I have discovered translations of the article in Russian, Korean and Chinese – so if you can read any of these languages, you might want to take a look at them before they disappear too.

If you want an original English version – dated April 2004, which is when I sent it in to Oracle Magazine, and before it underwent some editing – I’ve posted it as a pdf file.

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