I’ve always had a *thing* for trace files. They serve me well- I like them and they seem to really like me. I have a special affinity for deadlock trace files and someone needs to remind me to pester Cary Millsap about a tool to decipher them so I have even more data to go through…:) Even without any tools, I can easily pull out what is important and work from this data to run queries and reports to drill down to find work-arounds when changes to logic or design are not an option. Deadlocks, although quite unpleasant, I find…
-
-
The SMON spit out this error after the cycle of the db on the rollback of the huge insert into the largest table in one of our warehouse environments. I had serious concerns about a poor execution plan and wondered what we were going to be in for on the rollback and with good reason. The source to the performance hit was a combination of missing column statistics on the main table used for the joins from the staging table, but also fragmentation caused by a poor design choice, (yes, get exchange partition in there ASAP!) Here is the issue w/ fix with the…
-
Like Chet, from OracleNerd, I received my official Blogger Approval for Oracle Open World yesterday! This will be my first attendance, as something always came up before that kept me from going, so I am looking forward to the event. A number of people asked me why I didn’t submit a presentation, but I think I’m going to check out the event as a blogger for my first time out and see about presenting next year! 🙂
-
So we have a parallel process, coordinator 739 running, just not very well… I have an ugly pink section in my OEM grid and as we know, pink is not a DBA Girl’s favorite color… 🙂 Not so fast… the process, due to the wait on temp and then to buffer, has decided to “force” it to serial? Description OBJECT Obj Node Order Rows Bytes Cost In/Out PQ Dist. CREATE TABLE STATEMENT 12 3,200 PX COORDINATOR FORCED SERIAL 11 PX SEND QC (RANDOM) SYS.:TQ20001 :Q2001 10 13,717,999…
-
I started to write this blog post almost two months ago and finally updated it to post to the site. I think it’s a bit more fun in hindsight anyway… 🙂 With my children at an age where they really would like their mother to just go get a life, (and get out of theirs as much as possible… :)) I chose this year to approach Ron Bich and Tim Gorman at RMOUG training days and state my interest in participating more. I was quickly informed there was no escape at that point and told I had to put my…
-
Thanks to Chet Justice of OracleNerd, I’m now registered for Oracle Open World 2011 with the Blogger’s registration. I will be sitting here impatiently waiting for October now… 🙂 Anyone who remembers last year’s will also remember that I (again) did not get to attend and worked miserably through the week, listening to the tweets on Twitter and blurbs on Facebook, then was reminded on Blogs afterwards of all I missed. Not this year! I am going and I am going to enjoy it- try and stop me… 🙂
-
Although Streams is a goner, (Golden Gate taketh over…) My notes on performance considerations when utilizing streams as I work with it is always valuable. These came from a number of blogs, notes from Oracle and simple grief, so thought I would share… 🙂 1. TYPE OF DATA REPLICATION Due to the way this table is loaded, we need to be concious of “queue spill”. Queue spill, per Oracle’s support documentation, is associated with LCR’s not being processed in a timely fashion per interval from the buffered queue, resulting in the old LCRs to “spill” from memory out to disk…
-
Jeff Smith, via Twitter, asked a very good question about my previous post regarding baseline plans when upgrading from 10g to 11g, (or for previous versions, which I can also go into the steps in how to ensure more consistent performance during upgrades from earlier versions as well to 11g…) “…this assumes that new 11g plans wouldn’t be ‘better’..right? Are people gun-shy b/c 9-10 upgrade issues?” Why would we want to go back to 10g performance when we have just upgraded to a beautiful new version of 11g? Many responded in the Twitter conversation in regards to insurance and this…
-
When involved in an 11g upgrade of a 10g database, one of the important goals for a DBA is to maintain the same performance in the newly upgraded environment as the previous one. One of the best ways to accomplish this is through baseline collection of the execution plans that then can be imported and loaded directly into the SQL Plan Baseline once the database is upgraded. The disclaimer needs to be added, you must have a license for the tuning pack, so always check your DBA_FEATURE_USAGE_STATISTICS view and ensure you are in compliance. The steps to complete this are…
-
Another little known set of AWR reports are ones that are RAC specific and cluster wide versions, giving the RAC DBA a unique view of the cluster, no individual instance AWR report can provide. The first report can be run from the command line, resides in the $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin directory and is called awrgrpt.sql. Like the other versions of AWR, there is an HTML and a text version of the report offered, so when your manager or user would like to have something formatted and presented in an attractive format, there is an option. The report breaks down the cluster by…
-
Yes, I love AWR and ASH reports when performing database detective work. They are an essential tool in my performance tuning arsenal, along with the logs, trace files/profiling, Oracle Enterprise Manager and a suite of personally collect queries from over the years. As complex as databases are these days, the more data that I have at hand to backup what I am tuning or reporting on, the more comfortable I am, (OK, so I’m not one for “theories”… :)) Just as I would not use a screw driver to hammer in a nail, all DBA’s should understand and not confuse…
-
As many companies judge a DBA’s worth on the uptime of a database, nothing tests a DBA’s mettle like database service outages where the cause is indeterminate at the time of the outage. The secondary challenge is that once the database is brought back up, the DBA must then take the necessary steps to analyze the data and figure out what caused the outage, hopefully resolving or reporting to ensure outages to not re-occur. The DBA’s goal should not just be to resolve the issue, but to provide a high level, clearly documented report of what occurred and what steps…
-
RMOUG 2011 has come and gone- and it was a fantastic time for me. I loved the opportunity to talk for two days on database technology, (which my husband thanks all participants for, keeps him from wanting to jab his ears with large, sharp sticks to get away from the techno-garble that leaves his wife’s lips in droves! :)) and catch up on everyone’s lives. My presentation skills still need some work, as good as I think I am in smaller groups and especially one on one, I still have some challenges up at the podium. Every time I get…
-
I have a new post out on Pythian’s site: http://www.pythian.com/news/20301/the-dba-and-the-trigger/
-
I’ve been employed at Pythian for just over 2 months now. Not a very long time and yes, I’m still a “newbie”, but I’ve been there long enough to know why I do love my new job. 1. Working remotely. No, not everyone does and it’s not for everyone, but so far it’s been a win-win for both me and Pythian. I have never needed a manager or anyone to lean over my shoulder to tell me when to work and what to do, so working remotely in a home office has significant benefits for me. I appreciate the limited…
-
My slides and white paper are all submitted for RMOUG 2011 and I’m starting to get a bit anxious about the event. Being the “hometown girl” to represent Pythian comes with some new pressures that I didn’t feel last year when total failure just meant I was making a fool out of myself… 🙂 The schedule is looking pretty good so far, but as it goes every year, there are a number of presentations that I would like to attend that are all scheduled the same time as my own, (OK, so I would have only been able to attend ONE of them, but I…
-
I received an email from an obviously annoyed DBA this weekend. I’m sure many of you are not surprised, I can be rather annoying. The annoyance stemmed from a request I was working on to rebuild a number of bitmap indexes. The problem is, when I take on a problem, I have a tendency to demand to do things the right way, so a simple request to check bitmap indexes for fragmentation, always turns into a bit larger project with me at the helm. When it comes to indexes, it’s not just a simple rebuild. I want the index JUSTIFIED. …
-
Just about any DBA you speak with will admit to having at least one other DBA they follow on the web, seek out when the present at conferences or search out when purchasing technical books. I jokingly refer to these as DBA crushes, (which really annoys my male coworkers when I tell them they are “DBA crushing” when the arena is also predominently male… :)) Now that I am part of the Exadata team at #Pythian, I’ve been intensely focused on every scrap of online information regarding the technology and from all this research, I have come up with a new DBA…