wait event

I was asked some time ago what the Oracle database event ‘TCP socket (KGAS)’ means. This blogpost is a deep dive into what this event times in Oracle database 12.1.0.2.180717.

This event is not normally seen, only when TCP connections are initiated from the database using packages like UTL_TCP, UTL_SMTP and the one used in this article, UTL_HTTP.

A very basic explanation is this event times the time that a database foreground session spends on TCP connection management and communicating over TCP, excluding client and database link (sqlnet) networking. If you trace the system calls, you see that mostly that is working with a (network) socket. Part of the code in the oracle database that is managing that, sits in the kernel code layer kgas, kernel generic (of which I am quite sure, and then my guess:) asynchronous services, which explains the naming of the event.

This post is about the decision the Oracle database engine makes when it is using a full segment scan approach. The choices the engine has is to store the blocks that are physically read in the buffercache, or read the blocks into the process’ PGA. The first choice is what I refer to as a ‘buffered read’, which places the block in the database buffercache so the process itself and other processes can bypass the physical read and use the block from the cache, until the block is evicted from the cache. The second choice is what is commonly referred to as ‘direct path read’, which places the blocks physically read into the process’ PGA, which means the read blocks are stored for only a short duration and is not shared with other processes.

The fifth “word I do not use” is the Oracle technical term wait.

The Oracle Wait Interface

In 1991, Oracle Corporation released some of the most important software instrumentation of all time: the “wait” statistics that were implemented in Oracle 7.0. Here’s part of the story, in Juan Loaiza’s words, as told in Nørgaard et. al (2004), Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table.

This stuff was developed because we were running a benchmark that we could not get to perform. We had spent several weeks trying to figure out what was happening with no success. The symptoms were clear—the system was mostly idle—we just couldn’t figure out why.

When sifting through a sql_trace file from Oracle version 12.2, I noticed a new wait event: ‘PGA memory operation’:

WAIT #0x7ff225353470: nam='PGA memory operation' ela= 16 p1=131072 p2=0 p3=0 obj#=484 tim=15648003957

The current documentation has no description for it. Let’s see what V$EVENT_NAME says:

SQL> select event#, name, parameter1, parameter2, parameter3, wait_class 
  2  from v$event_name where name = 'PGA memory operation';

EVENT# NAME                                  PARAMETER1 PARAMETER2 PARAMETER3 WAIT_CLASS
------ ------------------------------------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------------
   524 PGA memory operation                                                   Other

Well, that doesn’t help…