11g Cases for Automatic SQL Plan Management Oracle 11g New Features Tips by Donald BurlesonJune 29, 2015

Oracle 11g New Features Tips

Good candidate situations would certainly be any upgrades of the Oracle 11g database system. Again, use a testing system with changed environment, possibly a Snapshot Standby Database, and run the application for a representative period of time. During this period,   Automatic SQL Plan Management would be enabled and Oracle would evolve the SQL Plan Baselines for our application. 

After this evolution, it is possible to use dbms_spm to create a staging table and then expdp to EXPORT the captured baselines and import them into the production system directly after upgrading. This would guarantee stable execution plans from the very beginning. How this is done will be shown in detail shortly.

Another scenario would be the deployment of a new application. The application vendor would ship well tuned plans in the form of exported SQL plan baselines together with the application which could be imported after the application was added to the database system. This would guarantee that the good plans would be used right away from the very beginning. Oracle would use new plans only if they were verified to not cause performance degradation.

A variation of this case could be using an 11g database as a testing system and IMPORT SQL Tuning Sets using a staging table from a pre-11g database system. By setting optimizer_features_enable to a pre-11g value, Oracle finds the best execution plans for the workload on the 11g testing system. After this, use the SQL Tuning set packed into a staging table again and then import them back into the pre-11g database.

SQL Plan Management in OEM

The enterprise manager comes with an interface for SQL plan management and offers full control of SQL plan evolution.

This shows the link to SQL Plan Control for the SMB in the Query Optimizer section of the SERVER pane. Also find the SQL Profiles and SQL Patches.

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