Oracle AWR STATSPACK Statistics Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

The AWR report is a great tool for use in monitoring day-to-day database activity. Careful usage of this report allows the DBA to quickly overview the health of the system and to identify possible hot spots, which stand out from the usual picture of the database workload.

It is very crucial to understand the information any particular AWR report section presents.  The main points of this chapter include:

• The AWR (STATSPACK) report has become the de-facto standard within Oracle for elapsed-time reports.
   

• The AWR and STATSPACK reports were originally designed for Oracle Technical Support Staff, and all of the metrics are not fully described in the Oracle documentation.
   

• The AWR and STATSPACK reports are invoked from the scripts in the $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin directory.
   

• The AWR and STATSPACK reports provide detailed elapsed-time report to expose the root cause of Oracle performance slowdowns and bottlenecks.
   

• The shorter time elapsed time between AWR or STATSPACK snapshots, the finer the granularity. Hence, frequent snapshot collection is advised during those times when a performance problem manifests itself.

Of course, reading the AWR report is just the beginning, and the DBA must clearly understand what steps to undertake according to the information contained in the AWR report in order to pro-actively react to the problems identified by an AWR or STATSPACK report.

In the next chapter, several novel approaches and techniques of database tuning using trend analysis and prediction based on AWR data will be introduced.
 

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