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

bfogarty_at_gaports.com wrote:
> 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
>

Such is the life in dealing with application vendors. Too many vendors really don't take the effort to ensure their applications work well and scale well. Thankfully, you can do a lot with the Oracle database to change how 3rd party apps run in the database. In your specific case, you can change the INITRANS. In my opinion, the vendor should take the lead on these sorts of issues. But is has been my observation that most vendors do not. Case in point...I'm working with one vendor that has an application which experiences occasional deadlocks (one or two a day). The vendor insists that the only way to solve the problem is to restart the database. Ugh...

Cheers,
Brian

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Brian Peasland
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