Reminder and Public Appearances 2011

April 6, 2011 By 2 Comments

First, a reminder – my Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting v2.0 online seminar starts next week already. Last chance to sign up, I can accept registrations until Sunday :-)

I won’t do another AOT seminar before Oct (or Nov) this year. More details and sign-up here:

I have rescheduled my Advanced SQL Tuning and Partitioning & Parallel Execution for Performance seminars too. I will do them in September/October. Unfortunately I’m too busy right now to do them before the summer.

Public Appearances:

  • I will be speaking at the UKOUG Exadata Special Event in London on 18th April
  • I have submitted a few papers for Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco as well (end of Sep/beginning of Oct), all about Exadata. Let’s see how it goes, but I’ll be there anyway, which means that I’ll probably show up at the Oracle Closed World event too!

And that’s all the travel I will do this year…

Virtual Conferences:

I’ll soon announce the 2nd EsSN virtual conference too ;-)

Free online stuff:

Perhaps in a month or so I will do another hacking session (I’ll plan 2 hours this time, 1 hour isn’t nearly enough for going deep). The topic will probably be about low-level details of SQL plan execution internals… stay tuned!

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

MOATS: The Mother of All Tuning Scripts!

March 29, 2011 By 47 Comments

People talk about the Oracle SQL Developer 3 being out, which is cool, but I have something even cooler for you today ;-)

I finally figured out how to convert my screen-recordings to uploadable videos, so that the text wouldn’t get unreadable and blurry.

So, here’s the first video, about a tool called MOATS, which we have built together with fellow OakTable Network member and a PL/SQL wizard Adrian Billington (of oracle-developer.net).

Here’s the video, it’s under 3 minutes long. Play the video in full screen for best results (and if it’s too slow loading, change it to lower resolution from HD mode):

Check it out and if you like MOATS, you can download it from Adrian’s website site (current version 1.05) and make sure you read the README.txt file in the zip!

Also thanks to Randolf Geist for finding and fixing some bugs in our alpha code… Note that MOATS is still kind of beta right now…

P.S. I will post my ORA-4031 and shared pool hacking video real soon now, too! :-)

P.P.S. Have you already figured out how it works?! ;-)

Update: Now you can suggest new features and improvement requests here:

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

An index of my TPT scripts

March 24, 2011 By 8 Comments

A lot of people have asked me whether there’s some sort of index or “table of contents” of my TPT scripts (there’s over 500 scripts in the tpt_public.zip file – http://tech.e2sn.com/oracle-scripts-and-tools )

I have planned to create such index for years, but never got to it. I probably never will :) So a good way to extract the descriptions of some scripts is this (run the command in the directory where you extracted my scripts to):

Note: the single and double-quotes may get messed up when the browser tries to be smart and replace them with nicer looking characters (which Unix doesn’t recognize then). When copying & pasting this command, make sure that the single & double-quotes are the regular ones Unix shell can accept):

$ grep -i Purpose: *.sql | awk -F: ‘{ printf(“%20s %-50s\n”, $1, $3) }’
            bhla.sql      Report which blocks are in buffer cache, protected by a cache
         bufprof.sql      Display buffer gets done by a session and their reason
            calc.sql      Basic calculator and dec/hex converter       
        channels.sql      Report KSR channel message counts by channel endpoints
        curheaps.sql      Show main cursor data block heap sizes and their contents
             dba.sql      Convert Data Block Address (a 6 byte hex number) to file#, block#
             ddl.sql      Extracts DDL statements for specified objects
              df.sql  Show Oracle tablespace free space in Unix df style
        diag_sid.sql      Display current Session Wait info            
        diag_sid.sql      An easy to use Oracle session-level performance snapshot utility
           disco.sql      Generates commands for disconnecting selected sessions
     getplusparm.sql      get sqlplus parameter value (such linesize, pagesize, sqlcode,
            grpn.sql      Quick group by query for aggregating Numeric columns
            hash.sql      Show the hash value, SQL_ID and child number of previously
             i2h.sql      Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting Seminar demo script
              im.sql      Display In-Memory Undo (IMU) buffer usage    
            init.sql Initializes sqlplus variables for 156 character terminal
       kglbroken.sql                                                   
       kglbroken.sql      Report broken kgl locks for an object this can be used for 
            kill.sql      Generates commands for killing selected sessions
              la.sql      Show which latch occupies a given memory address and its stats
     lastchanged.sql      Detect when a datablock in table was last changed
       latchprof.sql      Perform high-frequency sampling on V$LATCHHOLDER
   latchprof_old.sql      Perform high-frequency sampling on V$LATCHHOLDER
      latchprofx.sql      Perform high-frequency sampling on V$LATCHHOLDER
              lh.sql      Show latch holding SIDs and latch details from V$LATCHHOLDER
             lhp.sql      Perform high-frequency sampling on V$LATCHHOLDER
            lhpx.sql      Perform high-frequency sampling on V$LATCHHOLDER
     lotshparses.sql      Generate Lots of hard parses and shared pool activity 
    lotshparses2.sql      Generate Lots of hard parses and shared pool activity 
        lotslios.sql      Generate Lots of Logical IOs for testing purposes
        lotspios.sql      Generate Lots of Physical IOs for testing purposes
     lotssparses.sql      Generate Lots of soft parses and library cache/mutex activity 
    lotssparses2.sql      Generate Lots of soft parses and library cache/mutex activity 
       mutexprof.sql      Display KGX mutex sleep history from v$mutex_sleep_history
       nonshared.sql      Print reasons for non-shared child cursors from v$sql_shared_cursor
      nonshared2.sql      Show the reasons why more child cursors were created instead of
      ostackprof.sql      Take target process stack samples and show an execution profile
            pmem.sql      Show process memory usage breakdown – lookup by process SPID
     pmem_detail.sql      Show process memory usage breakdown details – lookup by process SPID
        prefetch.sql      Show KCB layer prefetch                      
          pvalid.sql      Show valid parameter values from V$PARAMETER_VALID_VALUES
        rowcache.sql      Show parent rowcache entries mathcing an object name
              rs.sql      Display available Redo Strands               
               s.sql      Display current Session Wait and SQL_ID info (10g+)
          sample.sql      Sample any V$ view or X$ table and display aggregated results
      sampleaddr.sql      High-frequency sampling of contents of a SGA memory address
             ses.sql      Display Session statistics for given sessions, filter by
            ses2.sql      Display Session statistics for given sessions, filter by
        sgastatx.sql      Show shared pool stats by sub-pool from X$KSMSS
            smem.sql      Show process memory usage breakdown – lookup by session ID
     smem_detail.sql      Show process memory usage breakdown details – lookup by session ID
         snapper.sql      An easy to use Oracle session-level performance snapshot utility
     snapper3.15.sql      An easy to use Oracle session-level performance snapshot utility
      snapper_v1.sql      An easy to use Oracle session-level performance snapshot utility
      snapper_v2.sql      An easy to use Oracle session-level performance snapshot utility
            stat.sql      Execute SQL statement in script argument and report basic
              sw.sql      Display current Session Wait info            
             sw2.sql      Display current Session Wait info            
             swg.sql      Display given Session Wait info grouped by state and event
             swo.sql      Display current Session Wait info            
          topsql.sql      Show TOP SQL ordered by user-provided criteria
            usql.sql      Show another session’s SQL directly from library cache
           usqlx.sql      Show another session’s SQL directly from library cache
        waitprof.sql      Sample V$SESSION_WAIT at high frequency and show resulting 
              xb.sql      Explain a SQL statements execution plan with execution 
            xde2.sql      Describe X$ tables, column offsets and report indexed fixed table
              xm.sql      Explain a SQL statements execution plan directly from library cache
             xma.sql      Explain a SQL statements execution plan directly from library cache
            xmai.sql      Explain a SQL statements execution plan with execution 
             xms.sql      Explain your last SQL statements execution plan with execution 
            xmsh.sql      Explain a SQL statements execution plan with execution 
            xmsi.sql      Explain a SQL statements execution plan with execution

 

Filed Under: Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , ,

Another (secret) hacking session with me – using Oracle Session Snapper for flexible troubleshooting (and fun)

October 25, 2010 By 13 Comments

And this time we have audio !!! (Wow!)

Following the huge success of my last hacking session, planned while drinking beer at Graham Woods OOW pre-party and delivered from Miracle’s massive Oracle Closed World event in Thirsty Bear (between drinking beers), I’m announcing another hacking session:

What: Using Session Snapper for flexible Oracle Performance Troubleshooting

When: Wednesday 27th Oct 9:00-10:00 AM PDT (US West coast / California time). Check what’s this in your time zone here

Where: Internet! -> Sign up here: http://tech.e2sn.com/secret

You’ll need to register fast and be “there” on time as my current GotoWebinar account only allow 100 attendees to log on… last time over 100 people signed up, but “luckily” less actually showed up, so nobody got left outside!

BTW, I have figured out what went wrong with audio last time and caused my voice in the end of presentation disappear). A program, which I accidentally launched via a keyboard shortcut, grabbed my Mic input to itself, so gotowebinar’s app couldn’t access it anymore.

See you soon!

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

A million kilometers in two years…

September 27, 2010 By

I’ve been tracking my business travel with Tripit.com‘s awesome service for about 2 years now.

After getting back from my Tallinn->Helsinki->New York->Detroit->New York->San Francisco->New York->Helsinki->Tallinn trip yesterday, Tripit reported that I have flown 1 007 509 km during my business trips (American readers, that’s about 42 miles ;)

Check yourself below :)

Tripit says I’ve visited 71 different cities in 27 countries within the last two years.

Here’s the map of places where I’ve visited my clients, done training or spoken at conferences:

Actually there’s probably couple of more cities where I’ve been in the last two years, for some reason Tripit doesn’t recognize my trip to Melbourne (but it does show the visit to Sydney which I did during the same trip).

Anyway, the conclusion here is that I think I’ve done enough flying for now. Now I plan to stay at home for a loooong time (I mean at least 3-4, maybe even 5 weeks in a row!!! ;)

But seriously, what I’ve decided is that:

  1. I won’t do any more public on-site seminars (with only few exceptions).
  2. I will move all my public seminar offering to web-based online seminars (using Citrix gotomeeting.com’s service), which I’ll deliver in person.
  3. I will still do private corporate training on-site occasionally, which offers flexibility of customizing the content and focus areas of the seminar to match the customer’s needs
  4. I will also offer private corporate online training, which gives much greater flexibility for choosing the seminar duration and times etc (it’s possible to spread a seminar to 1-day sections, each day delivered on a separate week, to reduce the impact of people being away from their work)
  5. I will still do consulting & advanced troubleshooting where I usually solve even the most complex problems in matter of couple of days (like explained here for example)

Ok, enough of self-promotion and advertising, back to work ;-)

P.S. I will publish my online seminar schedule “very soon now”!!!

P.P.S. I’m not affiliated with Tripit.com by any means business-wise, but if you travel frequently, then I recommend you to check out their awesome service (and iPhone app). The basic version is free, but I just decided to upgrade to Pro after couple of years of using it!

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With:

Flexible Sqlplus command line history with RLWRAP

May 7, 2010 By 9 Comments

At Hotsos Symposium Training Day I used rlwrap with sqlplus – which gives nice command line editing and history capabilities for tools like sqlplus. Additionally I pre-generated commonly used Oracle keywords, data dictionary view and package names into rlwrap wordfile, so I got nice tab-completion too. Sqlplus sucks much less with rlwrap ;-)

It’s relatively easy to install rlwrap on Unix (there are rlwrap RPMs out there, Solaris freeware packages and I installed it on Mac via macports.org). Just google around…

You can have rlwrap on Windows too – As rlwrap has been coded for Unix flavors, then on Windows you need to run it on a Unix library environment emulator – like Cygwin.

Dave Herring and Michael Paddock have both written an article about how to get rlwrap & sqlplus running on Windows, check out the articles here. It’s worth reading both as they have different additions…

So, if you want command line history, search and tab completion for sqlplus on Unix flavors or Windows, check these articles out!

http://daveherringsdbablog.blogspot.com/2010/03/sqlplus-command-history-with-cygwin.html

http://blog.enkitec.com/2010/04/29/using-sqlplus-with-rlwrap-on-ms-windows/

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: ,

My new website tech.e2sn.com and a new application

January 18, 2010 By 14 Comments

In early January I wrote that I’m gonna start organizing the more serious and practical Oracle content into my new website and I’ll leave my blog for Oracle hacks, my (IT) observations and philosophy, general thoughts and just fun.

It’s time to publish the newsite now with an application demo rototype which gives some clue of what kind of features will there be in the secret project I’ve been working on for several months with my friend and business partner.

The website is located here:

http://tech.e2sn.com

E2SN does have a meaning, but I’ll leave it a secret for now ( you are free to guess ;-)

So, there’s not much technical content at the site yet, but there’s a cool online app which you should check if you deal with SQL tuning and execution plan analysis much.

It’s called PlanViz, Oracle Execution Plan Visualization app, you can check it out here:

http://tech.e2sn.com/apps/planviz

Oh, I’ve also created something called a “Living Book” into my website, where I will write about Oracle, performance, troubleshooting, etc. There is also a place where people can request what I should write about there!

And that’s all for today!

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , , ,

Sometimes things are easy (Part 1): How to fix wrapped execution plan text?

January 18, 2010 By 1 Comment

What you see below is a common problem. Someone sends you (or posts to a forum) a wide execution plan, which is unreadable because of wrapped lines. For example, this one below:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------

| Id  | Operation                   | Name                    | E-Rows |  OMem |
 1Mem | Used-Mem |

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------

|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT            |                         |        |       |
 |          |

|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE             |                         |      1 |       |
 |          |

|*  2 |   HASH JOIN                 |                         |     13 |  1102K|
 1102K|  355K (0)|

|*  3 |    HASH JOIN                |                         |     13 |   988K|
 988K|  367K (0)|

|*  4 |     HASH JOIN               |                         |     13 |   921K|
 921K|  621K (0)|

|*  5 |      HASH JOIN OUTER        |                         |     13 |   836K|
 836K| 1224K (0)|

|*  6 |       HASH JOIN             |                         |     13 |   821K|
 821K|  501K (0)|

|*  7 |        HASH JOIN            |                         |     13 |  1102K|
 1102K|  501K (0)|

|   8 |         MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN|                         |      1 |       |
 |          |

|*  9 |          TABLE ACCESS FULL  | PROFILE$                |      1 |       |
 |          |

|  10 |          BUFFER SORT        |                         |      1 | 73728 |
 73728 |          |

|* 11 |           TABLE ACCESS FULL | PROFILE$                |      1 |       |
 |          |

|* 12 |         TABLE ACCESS FULL   | USER$                   |     36 |       |
 |          |

|  13 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL    | PROFNAME$               |      1 |       |
 |          |

|* 14 |       TABLE ACCESS FULL     | RESOURCE_GROUP_MAPPING$ |      1 |       |
 |          |

|  15 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL      | TS$                     |      7 |       |
 |          |

|  16 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL       | TS$                     |      7 |       |
 |          |

|  17 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL        | USER_ASTATUS_MAP        |      9 |       |
 |          |

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------

So now you either try to manually edit and fix the execution plan text so you could read it or ask the developer to send the execution plan again. Both approaches take time.

Well, sometimes things are easy – in this particular case I saved the above into a file called /tmp/x and ran the following command:

$ cat /tmp/x | awk '{ printf "%s", $0 ; if (NR % 3 == 0) print } END { print }'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                   | Name                    | E-Rows |  OMem | 1Mem | Used-Mem |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT            |                         |        |       | |          |
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE             |                         |      1 |       | |          |
|*  2 |   HASH JOIN                 |                         |     13 |  1102K| 1102K|  355K (0)|
|*  3 |    HASH JOIN                |                         |     13 |   988K| 988K|  367K (0)|
|*  4 |     HASH JOIN               |                         |     13 |   921K| 921K|  621K (0)|
|*  5 |      HASH JOIN OUTER        |                         |     13 |   836K| 836K| 1224K (0)|
|*  6 |       HASH JOIN             |                         |     13 |   821K| 821K|  501K (0)|
|*  7 |        HASH JOIN            |                         |     13 |  1102K| 1102K|  501K (0)|
|   8 |         MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN|                         |      1 |       | |          |
|*  9 |          TABLE ACCESS FULL  | PROFILE$                |      1 |       | |          |
|  10 |          BUFFER SORT        |                         |      1 | 73728 | 73728 |          |
|* 11 |           TABLE ACCESS FULL | PROFILE$                |      1 |       | |          |
|* 12 |         TABLE ACCESS FULL   | USER$                   |     36 |       | |          |
|  13 |        TABLE ACCESS FULL    | PROFNAME$               |      1 |       | |          |
|* 14 |       TABLE ACCESS FULL     | RESOURCE_GROUP_MAPPING$ |      1 |       | |          |
|  15 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL      | TS$                     |      7 |       | |          |
|  16 |     TABLE ACCESS FULL       | TS$                     |      7 |       | |          |
|  17 |    TABLE ACCESS FULL        | USER_ASTATUS_MAP        |      9 |       | |          |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All I did here was that I stripped out line feeds from all lines except every 3rd line (which is the real end of the original line).

Note that if your linesize is very wide (and trimspool/trimout settings are ON) then this script would need some adjustment…

I’m sure this trivial approach doesn’t work in all situations, but with this article I wanted to illustrate that sometimes things which seem hard can be made much easier with a little scripting knowledge. If you are thinking which technology you should learn next – then better check out a Perl, Python or some shell+AWK book :)

By the way, if you want real flexibility displaying your execution plans (from library cache), then check this out:

http://blog.tanelpoder.com/2009/05/26/scripts-for-showing-execution-plans-via-plain-sql-and-also-in-oracle-9i/

Filed Under: Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , ,

Measuring what matters

December 22, 2009 By 2 Comments

Cary Millsap’s recent post prompted me to write down some of the related thoughts in my head.

Here are few of my mantras for systematic troubleshooting and performance tuning, which have materialized in my head over the years of work:

  • Picking the right starting point to troubleshooting and performance tuning is the most important decision in that process.
  • Pick the wrong starting point and you end up going in circles.
  • The scope of your performance data needs to match the scope of your problem, otherwise you end up going in circles.
  • If you don’t measure what matters, you may end up fixing what doesn’t matter.
  • If you’re not systematic in your troubleshooting, you may get lucky, but you don’t want to be dependent on luck! Moreover, you wont’t need to be lucky if you are systematic in your work!
  • Performance tuning is overrated. Fixing fundamental design and coding flaws via changing a magic configuration parameter is a dream just like is getting slim and healthy via eating magic diet pills bought from TV shop.
  • Your response times are too long for only two reasons:
  1. You are doing too much work
  2. You are waiting for too much

…both of the above things can be measured in Oracle…

  • There’s no such thing as slow database or slow system. How can it be slow independently, without anyone experiencing this slowness?
    • If users say that a database is slow, they must be experiencing that somehow! The only way to experience database slowness is via a connection to it, in which case you’ll have a session (to measure).
    • If a monitoring system says that a database is slow, then it must be running and measuring response time of some task just like users do, otherwise it can not reliably say something is slow.
  • Performance is about one thing and one thing only – time. And time is measured in seconds, not in CPU utilization, number of physical IOs or looks of an execution plan.

Here’s a link to a Cary Millsap’s awesome post, read it!

By the way, as far as database design and writing SQL is concerned here’s a good chance to learn how to write SQL right from C. J. Date:

Filed Under: Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , ,

What’s a good way to learn some Oracle internals every day?

October 26, 2009 By 13 Comments

Sometimes when an attendee describes me some totally weird problem during a seminar, I am immediately able to answer something like “Hey this looks like a bug related to this Oracle configuration and can be influenced by xyz”.

And then people ask me “How the hell do you know all this stuff?”

Well, I haven’t been bitten by all of these bugs myself, but I have been doing something for many years, almost every day… reading my email!

Oh, and additionally I have configured Metalink to send me daily updates about new/updated notes, forum articles and… bug descriptions!

The last part is very important. Bug descriptions tell you something about new bugs found (and old bugs rediscovered) and sometimes their details tell you an interesting piece or two about Oracle internals related to them.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Cool stuff, Oracle, Productivity Tagged With: , , ,
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