Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog

Keeping the server and storage utilisation high October 9, 2009

A friend of mine sent me this today, from an old site of mine:

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From: John Smith
Sent: 07 October 2009 10:08
To: Sarah Sims
Cc: DBA team
Subject: RE: Performance issues on your Test servers
 

Hi Sarah,

Please could somebody tell us why this query is running repeatedly on your database:

SELECT composite_key , exact_time , object_type , table_name , user_id , xml_data FROM usr1234.acramendlogshd ORDER BY 2;

It’s very prominent in both of the 1-hour time slices I’ve analyzed so far, and is fetching the entire 12GB 20M-row table.  This is so absurd that it looks almost like a programming error!

The same table in the production environment is almost the same size, 18M-rows.
 
Regards,

John
******************************************

******************************************
From: Sarah Sims
Sent: 07 October 2009 11:18
To: John Smith
Cc: DBA team
Subject: RE: Performance issues on your Test servers

John,

This would be the ACRALS service which has a bug in it currently which means that it runs continuously but never achieves anything.

Sarah
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So, not only inefficient and pointless but known to be inefficient and pointless. And still on.

And as some of you may suspect, yep this is a third party application where changing the code is forbidden. Seems like testing before release might also be forbidden….