sorting and pga for non-mts

hi dba's

my world has been shattered with horrible thoughts of exactly how pga memory allocation takes place.

assume u have 4GB ram (your sga is 2gb and u set shmmax to 2gb, remaining free os memory is 2GB)

when a sort occurs .. i know that it will be done in pga..(assume sort requires 1M)

so tell me this .. where is this 1M taken from ?? ... will the pga use the os memory (not shared --> remaining 2GB) or will oracld allocate another shared segment(shmmax) for use by the sort request.

in a nutshell--> does pga use shared memory segments or does it use the remaining os memory(which i think sounds more logical).

the aim is to arrive at a proper sizing of the shmmax parameter. this is for o8i under sol2.6 for non-mts env Received on Wed Jul 05 2000 - 15:51:58 CDT