RE: When stats trash your performance

Stephen,  

It is correct that changes in stats can cause performance problems, but that is the exception, not the norm. In > 99% of the cases, you want to have the most accurate stats available to enable the CBO to make a well-informed decision. It sounds like what might have happened in your case is that the application queries were tuned for the RBO and the generation of stats enabled Oracle to use the CBO instead, which in some cases can cause worse performance (note again this is the exception, however if just one high-impact statement is changed for the worse it can have an impact on the entire system). In that case - your plan to delete the stats might work just fine. Also, maybe the stats weren't gathered accurately enough (too small sample size) - perhaps they should be gathered again with a higher sample size, or even computed (100% sample). Index stats should pretty much always be computed. If you don't know what the stats were before, then it will be hard to get back to them. You could do a restore to another test database and see what the stats used to be. Other things you might want to look into for the future are running statspack snapshots at level 6 to capture explain plans for comparison before & after updating stats, and using the stattab and statid parameters of the dbms_stats procedures to save your old stats before updating them.  

Regards,
Brandon Allen

-----Original Message-----

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org]On Behalf Of stephen booth Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2005 11:59 AM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: When stats trash your performance

I've heard mention in a number of talks that you shouldn't gather stats very often, even not at all once a system is bedded in, as it can cause your database to start performing really badly. I don't recall any one ever saying, or ever reading, an explanation as to why this might happen. Perhaps I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective but it seems axiomic that the fresher your stats the better decisions CBO is likely to make.

I've Googled and can't really find anything that seems relevant other than some references to gathering stats invalidating existing plans so meaning Oracle has to do a hard parse.

Can anyone point me to any documentation that might explain why this might happen. It's not something I've really had to deal with in the past (getting the system running and occasionally trying to tune the server to reduce/eliminate waits before it goes live has been most of what I've been involved in, we don't write code in house so SQL tuning hasn't really featured). Something with pointers as to how to resolve such problems would be very useful as well.

What has triggered this question is I've just been hit by a situation where one of our systems was running OK (performance wasn't great but was acceptable and wasn't noticably worse than when the system was put in) then one of the sysadmins (not DBA) was told by our FM supplier to analyze a half dozen tables and associated indexes that were used by a new module that's due to go live soon and had been loaded with some historical information that was required. He did so and, so he claims, the system started running noticably slower shortly after. He then decided to analyze all the rest of the tables and their indexes. Performance got worse. Four days later they notified me (for political reasons I have no involvement with this system or any other system that has gone live) and basically said "it's running slow, fix it.". I don't know if there were any existing stats which got over written (I've asked, still waiting for a response), if there weren't I'm considering just deleting all the stats and seeing if that helps.

This system is shutdown every night for backup so the plans get wiped out anyway.

Stephen

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Wed Dec 07 2005 - 13:13:41 CST