Oracle Stored Procedures Tips Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

 

Burleson Oracle Consulting provides world-class Oracle stored procedure PL/SQL tuning and PLSQL optimization at great rates. Just call for expert Oracle stored procedure support:

---

Oracle Stored Procedures Tips
By Don Burleson

Oracle stored procedures and triggers are faster than traditional code, which means they are becoming increasingly popular. As application code moves away from external programs and into the database engine, DBAs need to understand the related memory requirements for Oracle stored procedures and know how to manage Oracle stored procedures for optimal database performance.

For complete details on tuning Oracle stored procedures, see my book "Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference".  You can buy it direct from the publisher for 30%-off and get instant access to the code depot of Oracle stored procedure scripts.

Oracle stored procedures and triggers are becoming more popular, and more application code will move away from external programs and into the database engine. However, Oracle DBAs must be conscious of the increasing memory demands of Oracle stored procedures and carefully plan for the days when all of the database access code (PL/SQL) resides within the database.

Today, most Oracle Server databases have only a small amount of code in Oracle stored procedures, but this is rapidly changing. There are many compelling benefits to putting all Oracle SQL inside Oracle stored procedures, including:

• Better performance. Oracle stored procedures load once into the shared pool and remain there unless they become paged out. Subsequent executions of the Oracle stored procedure are far faster than executions of external code.
   
• Coupling of data with behavior. DBAs can use naming conventions to couple relational tables with the behaviors associated with a table (using Oracle stored procedures as "methods"). If all behaviors associated with the employee table are prefixed with the table name--employee.hire, employee.give_raise, for example--the data dictionary can be queries to list all behaviors associated with a table (select * from dba_objects where owner = 'EMPLOYEE'), and it's easy to identify and reuse code.
   
• Isolation of code. Since all SQL is moved out of the external programs and into the Oracle stored procedures, the application programs become nothing more than calls to Oracle stored procedures. As such, it becomes very simple to swap out one database and swap in another one.

One of the foremost reasons Oracle stored procedures and triggers function faster than traditional code is related to caching in the Oracle SGA. After an Oracle stored procedure has been loaded into the shared pool of the SGA, it remains there until it is paged out of memory to make room for other Oracle stored procedures. Items are paged out based on a least recently used (LRU) algorithm. Once loaded into the RAM memory of the shared pool, procedures will execute very quickly, and the trick is to prevent pool thrashing as many procedures compete for a limited amount of shared-pool memory.

The db_cache_size and shared_pool_size parameters define most of the size of the in-memory region that Oracle consumes on startup and determine the amount of storage available to cache data blocks, SQL, and Oracle stored procedures.

Oracle also provides a construct called a package. Essentially, a package is a collection of functions and Oracle stored procedures. DBAs can organize packages in a variety of ways. For example, you can group functions and Oracle stored procedures for employees logically together in an employee package:

This code encapsulates all employee behaviors into a single package, which will be added to Oracle Server's data dictionary. If DBAs force their programmers to use Oracle stored procedures, the SQL moves out of the external programs, and the application programs become nothing more than a series of calls to Oracle stored procedures. This makes the application programs completely portable, while at the same time offering the benefit of using the Oracle dictionary as a ventral repository for all SQL.

• Preparing the SGA for Oracle Stored Procedures
• Dictionary cache.
• Library cache.
• Shared SQL areas.
• Private SQL area (exists during cursor open/cursor close). Within the private SQL area are the persistent area and the runtime area.

How To Pin Oracle Packages

To prevent paging, you can mark packages as non-swappable, telling the database that after their initial load they must always remain in memory. This is called pinning, or memory fencing. Oracle provides the procedure dbms_shared_pool.keep for pinning a package. You can unpin packages by using dbms_shared_pool.unkeep. In addition to pinning packages at database startup time, you can call the dbmspool.keep procedure at runtime to pin a package of stand-alone Oracle stored procedures.

The choice of whether to pin a procedure in memory is a function of the size of the object and the frequency in which it is used.

Very large Oracle stored procedures that are called frequently might benefit from pinning, but you might never notice any difference in that case, because the frequent calls to the procedure will have kept it loaded into memory anyway.

In an ideal world, the init.ora shared_pool_size parameter would be large enough to accept every package, Oracle stored procedure, and trigger your applications might invoke. Reality, however, dictates that the shared pool cannot grow indefinitely, and you need to make wise choices regarding which objects you pin. You can query the sharable_mem column of the v$db_object_cache table to see how much memory each package consumes in the library cache.

Automatic Re-pinning of Oracle Stored Procedures

Monitoring Pinned Stored Procedures

There is a easy way to tell the number of times a nonpinned Oracle stored procedure was swapped out of memory and needed to be reloaded. One method of effectively measuring memory is to regularly run the estat/bstat utility (usually located in ~/rdbms/admin/utlbstat.sql and utlestat.sql) for measuring SGA memory consumption over a range of time (the range of time is the interval between running the bstat utility and running the estat utility).

Also, be aware that Oracle Server uses the relevant parameter, shared_pool_size, for other objects besides Oracle stored procedures. This means that one parameter fits all, and Oracle Server offers no method for isolating the amount of storage allocated to any subset of the shared pool, including the library cache where packages and Oracle stored procedures reside.

As memory becomes cheaper, it will eventually become desirable to have all of an application's SQL and code loaded into the Oracle library cache, where the code will be quickly available for execution by any external application regardless of platform or host language. The most compelling reasons for putting all SQL within packages are portability and code management. If all applications become "SQL-less," with calls to Oracle stored procedures, then DBAs will be able to port entire applications to other platforms without touching a line of the application code.

Don Burleson is a recognized expert in PL/SQL tuning and PLSQL optimization.  A special thanks to Gita Gupta, of Oracle Corporation, for help with this article.
 

For more Oracle stored procedure scripts, see "Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference".