Monthly Archives: November 2012

DBMS_STATS queries invisible indexes

I thought that an invisible index was never queried, but that it was only maintained as the table was modified.  But, when you use the dbms_stats package to gather statistics on a table, including its indexes, the invisible indexes are … Continue reading

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Comparison of number with LIKE suppresses index

We ran into a performance issue where all of the top queries in our AWR report were doing a LIKE comparison of a NUMBER column against a character literal like this: customer_number LIKE ‘123456%’ customer_number is a selective predicate and … Continue reading

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Scripts to collect, truncate Exadata state dumps

I’m still doing state dumps as described in my previous post. I wanted to collect the state dumps (diag process trace files) from all nodes of my Exadata database and decided to write a couple of scripts to automate it … Continue reading

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oradebug -g all dumps to diag process trace file

One of my favorite children’s books when my children were younger was one about the Berenstain Bears where Father Bear tries to teach his son how to ride a bike and keeps making all these dumb mistakes.  “Let that be … Continue reading

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_unnest_subquery=FALSE for PeopleSoft performance?

Oracle support recommends setting the hidden parameter _unnest_subquery to FALSE to improve the performance of PeopleSoft applications on Oracle databases.  I’m trying to understand the consequence of changing this parameter from its default setting of TRUE. PeopleSoft applications have a … Continue reading

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SET AUTOTRACE TRACEONLY to test effect of patch

In an earlier post I described the process that I go through to check the plans of production SQL queries to see if they change when you do a system upgrade or patch.  Today I’ve been following that process to … Continue reading

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