ORA-04033: Insufficient Memory to Grow Pool

Question:  I am trying to expand by shared_pool size and I get the ORA-04033 error:

SQL> alter system set shared_pool_size=10g  

ORA-02097: parameter cannot be modified because specified value is invalid
ORA-04033: Insufficient memory to grow pool  

How do I fix the ORA-04033 error?

Answer:  As the ORA-04033 message suggests, you do not have enough RAM allocated to the SGA to allow you to create a 10 gig shared pool. 

The oerr utility shows this for the ORA-04033 error, which is not very helpful:  

ORA-04033: Insufficient memory to grow pool

Cause: The system had insufficient memory to grow the pool to the specified size.

Action: Specify a smaller value to grow the pool.  

The ORA-04030 fix depends on your release of Oracle and you use of the sga_max_size parameter  and whether you have deployed Automatic Shared Memory Management (ASMM), a mechanism to automatically morph the pool sizes depending on system load.  Automatic memory management is enabled by using the memory_target  and memory_max_target initialization parameters.

Starting with Oracle9i, Oracle started using granules to include a reserved region of RAM memory for SGA growth, and this is the ORA-04033 limit when sga_max_size is deployed.  

Depending on your release and settings for parameters, the remedy to fix the ORA-04033 might include:

•  Reduce the size of another pool or choose a smaller value for your pool parameter.  This SGA memory shift will avoid the ORA-04033 error when there is enough spare RAM.

•  If you also see the ORA-04031: unable to allocate xxx bytes of shared memory, you need to Increase the RAM on the server (if not using sga_max_xxx parms)

• Increase sga_max_size and bounce the database (or use scope=memory)
  

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