RE: how many LIOs is too many

From: Mark W. Farnham <mwf_at_rsiz.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2014 18:36:18 -0500
Message-ID: <04f601cf1701$964145e0$c2c3d1a0$_at_rsiz.com>

I didn't read the sql, but if JL's observation that you're picking up data not yet processed is correct, a leading candidate to optimize your use case is a nullable column getting the date or timestamp on insertion and becoming null when processed. This becomes the action control column. A single column index on such a column tends to remain very small (and can be rebuilt if you have large epochs of new row arrival with no processing followed by processing windows.) IF you need to keep the insert date or timestamp, then you update the action control column to null and the permanent time or date column (born null) to the actual value upon processing in the same commit if you'd like to minimize row length change.  

mwf  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Lewis
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2014 4:50 PM
To: Ram Raman
Cc: ORACLE-L
Subject: RE: how many LIOs is too many      

It looks as if that code is trying to sweep through the table picking up
"the oldest data not yet processed", remembering to start of from where it
ended on the last pass (based on a two-part key). It also looks as if the developer expected it to use an index on (maudrecno, memrecno) to walk the index order so that it could stop after 500 suitable rows and return the data without sorting. If that's the case it's not obvious why the optimizer is choosing the wrong index.  

As someone else said, concurrency (in the same blocks) also pushes up the number of LIOs, so if this is "find the recent activity" the query is constantly scanning through recent data which is either not yet committed, or may be in need of block cleanout, and therefore produces lots of extra LIOs as visits to the undo segment.  

Off the top of my head I'm not certain that the optimizer can use the predicate at line 4 as an access predicate to do a "count stopkey" with
"sort order by nosort" - but I think it should be able to if you've got the
right index in place. So my next move would be to check if the index exists, run a test to see if it can do what I think it can, and if so create an SQL Baseline to force the use of that index.      

Regards
Jonathan Lewis
http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com
_at_jloracle

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From: Ram Raman [veeeraman_at_gmail.com] Sent: 21 January 2014 21:11
To: Jonathan Lewis
Cc: ORACLE-L
Subject: Re: how many LIOs is too many

Thanks to everyone who responded. Jonathan, how do you say that it is 1800 exec/hr? I did (789388/ (sysdate-first_load_time)); with about 33 days, it came to abuot 1,000 exec/hr.

I have some more information about the SQL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9YC82qZ8_3eNGxFeHdQdlJiN1k/edit?usp=sharin g    

In this case the number of LIOs per execution is probably not the important bit - the important bit is that the query seems to take a little over 2 CPU seconds per execution.

At 1,800 executions per hour (rather than the "few thousand" you suggest, this would be equivalent to eliminating one of your CPUs. Unless you've got at least 8 (real) CPUs, you don't want to be running this query; if you've got a small number of real CPUs which are using threads to fake themselves up to look like lots of CPUs you really don't want to be running this query.  

To answer your question

1. Yes - and the bizarre thing is that the code fetch a couple of hundred rows in order, processed and updated the first one (which took it off the list) then re-ran the query to fetch a couple of hundred again. If you can't see the code, try tracing it (and read the trace file) to see what the process does next after fetching the 500.
2. No formula that can be generally applied - especially if you're interested in precision. Rick's suggestion is a generous over-estimate and talks about "final set" - but doesn't make cleara that "final set" could have to allow for an aggregate: your query might be required to aggregate 20,000 rows to 500 - any estimate should be about the 20,000 not the 500. In your case (as Mark indicates) you may be acquiring and sorting a very large volume of data and then discarding all but 500 rows, and it's the volume acquired that matters, not the volume returned.

Bottom line - don't worry about the details at present, that query (with its current plan) is clearly too CPU-intensive to be run thousands of times per hour.

1. find out what it's doing and why - you may be able to reduce the execution count or fetched volume
2. review the current execution plan to see if there is a better path possible
3. review the SQL to see if it can be re-written

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Received on Wed Jan 22 2014 - 00:36:18 CET