Snapper v4.02 and the Snapper launch party video

Tanel Poder

2013-02-18

I have fixed most of the bugs that showed up during the Snapper launch party session and uploaded the new version (v4) of Snapper here:

I have uploaded some of my videos to https://www.youtube.com/tanelpoder:

I have not updated the snapper documentation yet, but here are the main improvements:

  1. RAC support (query remote instance’s sessions performance data via GV$)
  2. Manually specified “before and after” snapshot support. No need to use DBMS_LOCK to sleep for a certain number of seconds between snapshots
  3. Useful averages in the right side of the output (e.g. average bytes sent/received per roundtrip etc). I will keep adding new averages over the coming weeks.

RAC support

I have kept the syntax backwards-compatible, so when you run Snapper like this …

@snapper ash 5 1 user=tanel

… it will still query only local instance’s sessions.

But if you want to measure all tanel’s sessions in let’s say instance #2 only, you can just add @2 to the session filter condition:

@snapper ash 5 1 user=tanel@2

Or if you want all instances then use @*:

@snapper ash 5 1 user=tanel@*

If you want to measure a single session with sid 1234 in instance #2, you can do it in two ways:

@snapper ash 5 1 1234@2

Or use the inst_id,sid tuple syntax:

@snapper ash 5 1 (2,1234)

Note that the brackets are important, as otherwise snapper thinks that you want to measure SID 2 and SID 1234 in the local instance. You can pass multiple inst_id,SID tuples to the snapper though:

@snapper ash 5 1 (2,1234),(4,5678),(3,999)

Snapper still supports the qc= syntax too, to list all sessions started by a PX query coordinator session:

@snapper ash 5 1 qc=1234@*

Note that the qc= syntax is a bit broken/inconsistent right now – what the qc=1234@* means right now is that Snapper looks up the SID 1234 from every instance and lists slave sessions from all instances. If you use qc=1234@2 for example, then Snapper would only look for QC in the instance #2 and any slaves that are also in instance #2 (but with inter-instance parallelism you may have slaves in other instances too). I will fix it in a near-future version.

I will write about the other major features in separate blog entries, but if you want to learn about it now, then grab a beer (or coffe) and watch the hackig session that I once recorded in my Oracle performance & troubleshooting Youtube channel.

P.S. Some queries (like the qc=) one may take a while to run, running dynamic queries with subqueries against GV$ views efficiently is tricky business. Reducing the number of sessions or statistics reported will likely make Snapper run faster. I have kept the older and simpler Snapper v3 (no RAC-support) in the standard (old) snapper address.

Update: There’s an older document with Snapper (v3) capabilities on my old Oracle performance & troubleshooting site too.

Update 2: There’s a higher level overview video about my ashtop.sql and Snapper tool in my Youtube channel too (Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting preparation session).


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