Oracle Utilities Tips

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Donald K. Burleson

Oracle Utilities Tips

Analyzing tkprof Results

So what should DBAs be looking for? Here’s a small checklist of items to watch for in tkprof formatted files:

• Compare the number of parses to number of executions. A well-tuned system will have one parse per n executions of a statement and will eliminate the re-parsing of the same statement.

• Search for SQL statements that do not use bind variables (:variable). These statements should be modified to use bind variables.

• Identify those statements that perform full table scans, multiple disk reads, and high CPU consumption. These performance benchmarks are defined by the DBA and need to be tailored to each database. What may be considered a high number of disk reads for an OLTP application may not even be minimal for a data warehouse implementation.
The tkprof process will be explained in six easy steps.

Step 1: Check the Environment

Before tracing can be enabled, the environment must first be configured by performing the following steps:

• Enable Timed Statistics – This parameter enables the collection of certain vital statistics such as CPU execution time, wait events, and elapsed times. The resulting trace output is more meaningful with these statistics. The command to enable timed statistics is:
ALTER SYSTEM SET TIMED_STATISTICS = TRUE;

• Check the User Dump Destination Directory – The trace files generated by Oracle can be numerous and large. These files are placed by Oracle in the user_dump_dest directory as specified in the init.ora. The user dump destination can also be specified for a single session using the alter session command. Make sure that enough space exists on the device to support the number of trace files that you expect to generate.

SQL> select value
from v$parameter
where name = 'user_dump_dest';

VALUE
---------------------------------
C:\Oracle\admin\ORCL92\udump

Once the directory name is obtained, the corresponding space command (OS dependent) will report the amount of available space. Delete unwanted trace files before starting a new trace to free up the disk space.