Re: is it possible to query an oracle database to find out how hard it's working?

> The DBAs don't want a
> particular query to run if the database server box has less than 10%
> idle CPU time, becuase, empirically, this is when the database is "too
> busy".

But are they sure that the database is using that CPU extensively? It could be something else on the server that is consuming the CPU resources and the database is waiting on I/O. If this is the case (which happens all of the time), then the above statement really has no merit.

> V$SYSSTAT has a TON of information. Would you suggest any info in
> particular?

It depends on what you want to look at.

For disk activity, you might want to look at: physical reads
physical reads direct
physical writes
physical writes direct

For network activity, you might want to look at: bytes received via SQL*Net [from|to] [client|dblink]

For CPU activity, you might want to look at: CPU used by this session

Keep in mind that values from V$SYSSTAT are from instance startup. So to get an idea for a particular time period, you will have to read beginning and ending values and compute the difference for that time period.

The above list is by no means a complete and all-inclusive one. There are many other numbers that one could look at to see if the system is "busy" and there are many different ways it could be working.

HTHm,
Brian

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Brian Peasland
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