Re: constant monitoring and enqueues?

Very interesting post.

You do get a bit more help though, since x$kqfco gives codes for the internal and external representations of the columns, so you don't have to rely on the column types in 'desc X$TABLE' to make guesses about the actual fields - although your comment about hidden structues is obviously a dire warning.

--
Jonathan Lewis
Yet another Oracle-related web site:  http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk

Practical Oracle 8i:  Building Efficient Databases

Publishers:  Addison-Wesley
See a first review at:
http://www.ixora.com.au/resources/index.htm#practical_8i
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hailey_kyle_at_my-deja.com wrote in message <93njfh$rb6$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com>...


>permissions. Anyway it's hardly worth doing for most people unless you

>are a firefighter and that is all you do. Without knowledge of the

>underlying C structure we don't know the widths of the fields in the

>structure. Oracle often packs alot of bit flags into the same C-code

>integer variable, but a describe of the X$table doesn't say they are

>bit fields; it says they are numbers. So if we start at address X for

>field A, which is actually a bit value, and then try to find field B

>which is also a bit value, assuming we skip a byte to find the

>next "number" we have gone too far since A and B are bit values and

>only 1 bit wide, so B is at X+1 not X+8. It gets all the more

>complicated with pointers and longs and characters and 64 bit

>archictecture etc, but of course if we have access to the source this

>is easy.