Performance Monitoring: Active Session History at work

Teaching an Oracle Database 10g Performance Tuning course this week, I introduced the 10g New Feature Active Session History (ASH) to the students. That was one major improvement – together with the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) and the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) – of the 10g version. Way better than STATSPACK was before!

Imagine you are a DBA on a production system and get an emergency call like “The Database is dead slow!”. You are supposed to spot the cause as soon as possible. ASH kicks in here: We sample the Wait-Events of active sessions every second into the ASH-Buffer. It is accessed most comfortable with the Enterprise Manager GUI from the Performance Page (Button ASH Report there). Or with little effort from the command line like this:

-----------------------------------------
--
-- Top 10 CPU consumers in last 5 minutes
--
-----------------------------------------
SQL> select * from
(
select session_id, session_serial#, count(*)
from v$active_session_history
where session_state= 'ON CPU' and
 sample_time > sysdate - interval '5' minute
group by session_id, session_serial#
order by count(*) desc
)
where rownum <= 10;
--------------------------------------------
--
-- Top 10 waiting sessions in last 5 minutes
--
--------------------------------------------
SQL> select * from
(
select session_id, session_serial#,count(*)
from v$active_session_history
where session_state='WAITING'  and
 sample_time >  sysdate - interval '5' minute
group by session_id, session_serial#
order by count(*) desc
)
where rownum <= 10;

These 2 queries should spot the most incriminating sessions of the last 5 minutes. But who is that and what SQL was running?

--------------------
--
-- Who is that SID?
--
--------------------

set lines 200
col username for a10
col osuser for a10
col machine for a10
col program for a10
col resource_consumer_group for a10
col client_info for a10

SQL> select  serial#,
 username,
 osuser,
 machine,
 program,
 resource_consumer_group,
 client_info
from v$session where sid=&sid;

-------------------------
--
-- What did that SID do?
--
-------------------------

SQL> select distinct sql_id, session_serial# from v$active_session_history
where sample_time >  sysdate - interval '5' minute
and session_id=&sid;
----------------------------------------------
--
-- Retrieve the SQL from the Library Cache:
--
----------------------------------------------
col sql_text for a80
SQL> select sql_text from v$sql where sql_id='&sqlid';

You may spot the cause of the current performance problem in very short time with the shown technique. But beware: You need to purchase the Diagnostic Pack in order to be allowed to use AWR, ADDM and ASH