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5.1.1.3 Active Session History (ASH)
The V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY view provides sampled session activity in the instance. Active sessions are sampled every second and are stored in a circular buffer in SGA. Any session that is connected to the database and is waiting for an event that does not belong to the Idle wait class is considered as an active session. This includes any session that was on the CPU at the time of sampling.
Each session sample is a set of rows and the V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY view returns one row for each active session per sample, returning the latest session sample rows first. Because the active session samples are stored in a circular buffer in SGA, the greater the system activity, the smaller the number of seconds of session activity that can be stored in the circular buffer. This means that the duration for which a session sampl