I am Neo off the Matrix (apparently)

I know I have mentioned it before, but I am a big fan of the OEM performance screens that are derived from the ASH/AWR information. One of the things I really like about it is the immediate information it gives you, in one glance, that things are “not normal”. Once you notice that things are not normal you can then, within a few seconds, get a feel for what is still probably OK and where you have something that has changed.

As an example of the immediate information, I recently came back to my desk and glanced at my OEM performance screen. It was showing the below:

This will not be an interesting picture to you, but to me it tells me a lot about my system

“data load has just ran” I said to my comrade-in-arms. “which one?” he asked. “The Delta – It ran the quick plan. But it started a bit late, 12:15. Oh, and looks like the transaction view code has swapped back to the full table scan plan and the summary code is not playing up at the moment.”

“you’re turning into Neo you are – can you see a lady in a red dress???” he asked.

That was of course a reference to the “Matrix” films where at times you see the virtual world displayed on a screen as a stream of characters running down the screen – but once you get used to it you can apparently “see” what is going.

The screen shot above is not even actually a very good example of what the performance screens can show you. One of my minor complaints about the performance screens is that it scales to show the greatest of the largest peak or a number of sessions to match the number of CPUs (real or fake) that are available to you. So if you have more CPU available than you need, you can’t see much detail in the graph. And if you have had a nasty peak of activity, again, all detail is squeezed out. In my case, the box is sized to cope in 12 months and the system is new, so activity is scuttling along the bottom of the graph.

However, “poor” though the example is, it told me what was going on across my system at a glance, something about the major tasks we are running, that one problem is currently occurring and that several of the other issues I need to keep an eye out for are not occurring.

That is why I love these screens – I recognise “my” activity patterns from the graph, I now recognise the SQL IDs for my key statements. If I see a pattern in the graph I don’t recognise, I need to check things out immediately. Three or four times over the last 2 weeks I have spotted an issues, started investigating and found out the cause before the Operations desk has even noticed an issue.

Oh, and what is SQL type 189? It is a merge statement. Our implementation of OEM is a little old, it does not correctly interpret that SQL command type. It might be a little old, it is still a lot useful.