In the “Parse Puzzle” I posted a couple of days ago I showed a couple of extracts from an AWR report that showed contradictory results about the time the instance spent in parsing and hard parsing, and also showed an amazing factor of 4 difference between the DB Time and the “SQL ordered by Elapsed Time”. My example was modelling a real world anomaly I had come across, but was engineered to exaggerate the effect to make it easy to see what was going on.

Here are some details from an AWR report covering a few minutes in the lifetime of an instance of 18.3. It’s a carefully constructed demonstration and all I’ve done is take an AWR snapshot, execute a single SQL statement, then take another snapshot, so the only thing captured by the report is the work done in that brief time interval. The purpose of the exercise is to demonstrate how some Oracle features can make a complete nonsense of the AWR. (I have, as I often do, produced a model that reproduces an affect that can appear in production but exaggerates the effect to make it more clearly visible.)

First the Time Model statistics:

This is a blog note that started life in September 2001 (which was before I started blogging, I think), got drafted as a blog in January 2014 because of a question on the Oracle-L list server, and has finally got to publication following a question on the ODC database forum. (But the comments in the blog don’t look as if they are relevant to the question.)

The question on Oracle-l was:  Why is the same CLOB datablock read multiple times?

The answer is basically: client programs tend to set a “sensible” fetch buffer size for LOBs and if the buffer size is less than the size of the LOB the block(s) the LOB is in have to be visited multiple times and for nocache LOBs that means the block(s) will be read multiple times.

This can be seen quite easily in SQL*Plus which has two helpful parameters (one dating back to at least v5):

A thread started on the Oracle-L list-server a few days ago asking for help analysing a problem where a simple “insert values()” (that handled millions of rows per day) was running very slowly. There are many reasons why this might happen, ranging from the trivial (someone has locked the table in exclusive mode), through the slightly subtle (we’re trying to insert a row that collides on a uniqueness constraint with an uncommitted insert from another session) to the subtle (Oracle has to read through the undo to check current versions of blocks against read-consistent versions) ending up at the esoteric (the ASSM space management blocks are completely messed up again).

Last week I wrote a note about turning a range-partitioned table into a range/list composite partitioned table using features included in 12.2 of Oracle. But my example was really just an outline of the method and bypassed a number of the little extra problems you’re likely to see in a real-world system, so in this note I’m going to bring in an issue that you might run into – and which I’ve seen appearing a number of times: ORA-14097: column type or size mismatch in ALTER TABLE EXCHANGE PARTITION.

In yesterday’s note on the options for converting a range-partioned table into a composite range/list parititioned table I mentioned that you could do this online with a single command in 18c, so here’s some demonstration code to demonstrate that claim:

I wrote a short note a little while ago demonstrating how flexible Oracle 12.2 can be about physically rebuilding a table online to introduce or change the partitioning while discarding data, and so on.  But what do you do (as a recent question on ODC asked) if you want to upgrade a customer’s database to meet the requirements of a new release of your application by changing a partitioned table into a composite partitioned table and don’t have enough room to do an online rebuild. Which could require two copies of the data to exist at the same time.)

If you’ve got the down time (and not necessarily a lot is needed) you can fall back on “traditional methods” with some 12c enhancements. Let’s start with a range partitioned table:

This note is a reminder combined with a warning about unexpected changes as you move from version to version. Since it involves LOBs (large objects) it may not be relevant for most people but since there’s a significant change in the default character set for the database as you move up to 18.3 (or maybe even as you move to 12.2) anyone using character LOBs may get a surprise.

Here’s a simple script that I’m first going to run on an instance of 11.2.0.4:

When dealing with the library cache / shared pool it’s always worth checking from time to time to see if a new version of Oracle has changed any of the statistics you rely on as indicators of potential problems. Today is also (coincidentally) a day when comments about “parses” and “parse calls” entered my field of vision from two different directions. I’ve tweeted out references to a couple of quirkly little posts I did some years ago about counting parse calls and what a parse call may entail, but I thought I’d finish the day off with a little demo of what the session cursor cache does for you when your client code issues parse calls.

Here’s an odd little change between Oracle versions that could have a stunning impact on the application performance if the thing that generates your client code happens to use an unlucky selection of constructs.  It’s possible to demonstrate the effect remarkably easily – you just have to describe a table, doing it lots of times to make it easy to see what’s happening.