Top Ten Mistakes Found in Oracle Systems

Copied from Oracle9i Database Performance Planning Release 2 (9.2)

Top Ten Mistakes Found in Oracle Systems

1. Bad Connection Management

   The application connects and disconnects for each database interaction. This problem is common with stateless middleware in application servers. It has over two orders of magnitude impact on performance, and it is totally unscalable.

2. Bad Use of Cursors and the Shared Pool

   Not using cursors results in repeated parses. If bind variables are not used, then there is hard parsing of all SQL statements. This has an order of magnitude impact in performance, and it is totally unscalable. Use cursors with bind variables that open the cursor and execute it many times. Be suspicious of applications generating dynamic SQL.

3. Getting Database I/O Wrong

   Many sites lay out their databases poorly over the available disks. Other sites specify the number of disks incorrectly, because they configure disks by disk space and not I/O bandwidth.

4. Redo Log Setup Problems

   Many sites run with too few redo logs that are too small. Small redo logs cause system checkpoints to continuously put a high load on the buffer cache and I/O system. If there are too few redo logs, then the archive cannot keep up, and the database will wait for the archive process to catch up.

5. Serialization of data blocks in the buffer cache due to lack of free lists, free list groups, transaction slots (INITRANS), or shortage of rollback segments.

   This is particularly common on INSERT-heavy applications, in applications that have raised the block size to 8K or 16K, or in applications with large numbers of active users and few rollback segments.

6. Long Full Table Scans

   Long full table scans for high-volume or interactive online operations could indicate poor transaction design, missing indexes, or poor SQL optimization. Long table scans, by nature, are I/O intensive and unscalable.

7. In Disk Sorting

   In disk sorts for online operations could indicate poor transaction design, missing indexes, or poor SQL optimization. Disk sorts, by nature, are I/O-intensive and unscalable.

8. High Amounts of Recursive (SYS) SQL

   Large amounts of recursive SQL executed by SYS could indicate space management activities, such as extent allocations, taking place. This is unscalable and impacts user response time. Recursive SQL executed under another user ID is probably SQL and PL/SQL, and this is not a problem.

9. Schema Errors and Optimizer Problems

   In many cases, an application uses too many resources because the schema owning the tables has not been successfully migrated from the development environment or from an older implementation. Examples of this are missing indexes or incorrect statistics. These errors can lead to sub-optimal execution plans and poor interactive user performance. When migrating applications of known performance, export the schema statistics to maintain plan stability using the DBMS_STATS package.

   Likewise, optimizer parameters set in the initialization parameter file can override proven optimal execution plans. For these reasons, schemas, schema statistics, and optimizer settings should be managed together as a group to ensure consistency of performance.

10. Use of Nonstandard Initialization Parameters

    These might have been implemented based on poor advice or incorrect assumptions. In particular, parameters associated with SPIN_COUNT on latches and undocumented optimizer features can cause a great deal of problems that can require considerable investigation.