In a recent ODC thread someone had a piece of SQL that was calling dbms_random.string(‘U’,20) to generate random values for a table of 100,000,000 rows. The thread was about how to handle the ORA-30009 error (not enough memory for operation) that is almost inevitable when you use the “select from dual connect by level <= n” strategy for generating very large numbers of rows, but this example of calling dbms_random.string() so frequently prompted me to point out an important CPU saving , and then publicise through this blog a little known fact (or deduction) about the dbms_random.string() function.

It’s the gift that keeps on giving – no matter how many problems you find there are always more waiting to be found. It’s been some time since I last wrote about tables with more than 255 columns, and I said then that there was more to come. In the last article I described how adding a few columns to a table, or updating a trailing column in a way that made the table’s used column count exceed 255, could result in some strange row-splitting behaviour – in this article I’m going to look at a critical side effect of that behaviour.

A recent client was seeing a very large redo penalty from refreshing materialized views. Unfortunately they had to be refreshed very frequently, and were being handled with a complete refresh in atomic mode – which means delete every row from every MV then re-insert every row.  The total redo was running at about 5GB per hour, which wasn’t a problem for throughput, but the space for handling backup and recovery was getting a bit extreme.

The requirement consisted of two MVs which extracted and aggregated row and column subsets in two different ways from a single table; then two MVs that aggregated one of the first MVs in two different ways; then two MVs which each joined one of the first level MVs to one of the scond level MVs.

Here’s a follow-on from Tuesday’s (serious) note about a bug in 12.1.0.2 that introduces random slowdown on large-scale inserts. This threat in this note, while truthful and potentially a nuisance, is much less likely to become visible because it depends on you doing something that you probably shouldn’t be doing.

There have always been problems with ASSM and large-scale deletes – when should Oracle mark a block as having free space on deletion: if your session does it immediately then other sessions will start trying to use the free space that isn’t really there until you commit; if your session doesn’t do it immediately when can it happen, since you won’t want it done on commit – but that means the segment could “lose” a lot of free space if something doesn’t come along in a timely fashion and tidy up.

After yesterday’s post one of the obvious follow-up questions was whether the problem I demonstrated was a side effect of my use of PL/SQL arrays and loops to load data. What would happen with a pure “insert select” statement.  It’s easy enough to check:

Here’s a problem with ASSM that used to exist in older versions of Oracle had disappeared by 11.2.0.4 and then re-appeared in 12.1.0.2 – disappearing again by 12.2.0.1. It showed up on MoS a few days ago under the heading: “Insert is running long with more waits on db file sequential read”.

Here’s an odd little quirk that appeared when I was playing around with default values just recently. I think it’s one I’ve seen before, I may even have written about it many years ago but I can’t find any reference to it at present. Let’s start with a script that I’ll run on 12.2.0.1 (the effect does appear on earlier versions):

One of the special events that can make it necessary to rebuild an index is the case of the “massive DML”, typically a bulk delete that purges old data from a table. You may even find cases where it’s a good idea to mark a couple of your indexes as unusable before doing a massive delete and then rebuild them after the delete.

Despite the fact that a massive delete is an obvious special case it’s still not necessary in many cases to worry about a rebuild afterwards because the space made free by the delete will be smoothly reused over time with very little variation in performance. There is, however, one particular feature that increases the probability of a rebuild becoming necessary – global (or globally partitioned) indexes on partitioned tables. The problem (and the absence of problem in non-partitioned tables) is in the nature of the rowid.

This posting was prompted by a tweet from Kamil Stawiarski in response to a question about how he’d discovered the meaning of Redo Op Codes 5.1 and 11.6 – and credited me and Julian Dyke with “the hardest part”.

Over the years I’ve accumulated (from Julian Dyke, or odd MoS notes, etc.) and let dribble out the occasional interpretation of a few op codes – typically in response to a question on the OTN database forum or the Oracle-L listserver, and sometimes as a throwaway comment in a blog post, but I’ve never published the full set of codes that I’ve acquired (or guessed) to date.

The following is the text of an article I published in the UKOUG magazine several years ago (2010), but I came across it recently while writing up some notes for a presentation and thought it would be worth repeating here.

Fast Now, Fast Later

The title of this piece came from a presentation by Cary Millsap and captures an important point about trouble-shooting as a very memorable aphorism. Your solution to a problem may look good for you right now but is it a solution that will still be appropriate when the database has grown in volume and has more users.

I was actually prompted to write this article by a question on the OTN database forum that demonstrated the need for the basic combination of problem solving and forward planning. Someone had a problem with a fairly sudden change in performance of his system from November to December, and he had some samples from trace files and Statspack of a particular query that demonstrated the problem.