The SQL Tuning Process Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

The process of tuning Oracle SQL is both iterative and time-consuming. We begin by locating offensive SQL statements either by “fishing” them from the library cache or by extracting them from the stats$sql_summary table.

Next, we explain the SQL, tune each statement, and make the changes permanent.

Note: If you tune your SQL by adding an index, you can go backward in time and reexplain historical SQL in the stats$sql_summary table. This technique will verify that the new indexes have improved the execution plans of historical SQL.

There are several steps that are repeated until all major SQL is tuned:

1.      Locate Here we locate offensive and high-impact SQL statements using STATSPACK tables, the library cache, or the application source code.

2.      Extract Next we extract the offensive SQL syntax.

3.      Explain The extracted SQL from step 2 is then passed to the Explain Plan utility to get the execution plan.

4.      Tune We then tune the SQL with indexes, hints, and query rewrites. For each change, we reevaluate the new execution plan and test the execution time using the SQL*Plus set timing on command.

5.      Finalize Make the tuning permanent by changing the SQL source program or by creating a stored outline with the optimizer plan stability utility.

Of course, this is a highly simplified outline, since each step can be quite complicated. Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps.

Step 1: Identify High-Impact SQL

We begin our investigation into Oracle SQL tuning by viewing the SQL that currently resides inside our library cache. Many people ask where they should start when tuning Oracle SQL. Tuning Oracle SQL is like a fishing expedition; you must first “fish” in the Oracle library cache to extract SQL statements, and rank the statements by their amounts of activity.

Oracle makes it quite easy to locate frequently executed SQL statements. The SQL statements in the v$sqlarea view are rank-ordered by several values. These are presented in order, with the most important first.

• executions  The more frequently executed SQL statements should be tuned first, since they will have the greatest impact on overall performance.

• disk_reads  High disk reads indicates a query that is causing lots of disk I/O.

• rows_processed  Queries that process a large number of rows will have high I/O and may also have an impact on the TEMP tablespace if sorting occurs.

• buffer_gets  High buffer gets may indicate a resource-intensive query.

• sorts  Sorts can be a huge slowdown, especially if the sorts are being done on disk in the TEMP tablespace.

You can get lists of your SQL statements from the v$sqlarea view or stats$sql_summary table in descending order of any of these variables.

The executions column of the v$sqlarea view and the stats$sql_summary table can be used to locate the most frequently used SQL. When fishing for SQL, you can use a third-party tool to display the SQL in the library cache or write your own extraction script. The next section will cover three ways to extract high-impact SQL:

• Extract SQL from stats$sql_summary with the STATSPACK SQL top-10 report (rpt_sql_STATSPACK.ksh).

• Extract SQL from the v$sqlarea view using the rpt_sql_cache.ksh script.

• Extract and analyze SQL from the library cache using access.sql.

Please note that either of these techniques can be used with either the historical STATSPACK stats$sql_summary table or with the v$sqlarea view. The columns in v$sqlarea and stats$sql_summary are identical.

This is an excerpt from "Oracle High-Performance SQL Tuning" by Donald K. Burleson, published by Oracle Press.