Is Vendor or Customer Responsible for Tuning INITRANS / PCTFREE / PCTUSED ?

A software package we purchased from a third-party vendor occasionally gets "ITL waits". Sometimes the session that waits will hang for an extended period of time. The database is 10gR2. I used v $segment_statistics to determine how many "ITL wait" events have occurred in the various segments.

I reported this to the vendor and asked for their recommendation on what changes to make to INITRANS and possibly to PCTFREE and PCTUSED. (When creating tables and indexes they took the default values of 1 for tables and 2 for indexes where INITRANS is concerned.) The vendor said that it is up to me to decide on what changes to make to these parameters. They say that ITL waits are not an issue at other sites and since our volume of work is much higher than that of most other customers' it is our responsibility to tune these settings. I respond that since many other sites do not have a DBA on staff they do not know if ITL waits are an issue for other customers. Our software vendor no longer has an Oracle DBA on staff.

I will probably end up making these changes without assistance from the vendor.

I would like your opinion on who is responsible for tuning INITRANS. Is it the DBA of the customer or the vendor?

I do not want to spend a lot of time trying to get a near perfect setting for INITRANS. Is there a quick way to approximate an acceptable setting?

Thank you,
Bill Received on Wed Oct 24 2007 - 10:13:23 CDT