Greg - I am pulling the logs and other details to submit as an SR to Oracle. Pete - I think the issue may be different, but the recommended workaround (turning off automatic PGA management) may end up being the same. Mark - I agree that the external memory limits may be worse. I did mention that the full query (400+ ICNs) finished in 5 minutes on the 9i standby machine that's normally used for ad hoc reporting purposes and that the execution plans look the same on both platforms, at least for an 'IN' list that only contained 5 ICNs. They both look up all entries of the list against each table, one at a time, using unique index each time, and concatenate the results. The two machines have the same PGA settings. I think the user understands the importance of running these queries on the standby box, but we cannot afford to have this box crashing either. It's being upgraded in the next week or so. Thus the need for a solution that works for 11g on both systems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:37:07 +0000 Subject: Re: Killer SQL and PGA From: Peter Hitchman <pjhoraclel@xxxxxxxxx> Hi, There is a not on MOS - 460424.1, about Solaris 10 issues with PGA memory allocation. Not sure it fits your problem or not. Have you refreshed statistics on the 11.2 database? If not I would try that assuming that the issue is not down to contention between Solaris 10 and Oracle memory management. Regards Pete ------------------------------ From: "Mark W. Farnham" <mwf@xxxxxxxx> Subject: RE: Killer SQL and PGA Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:17:18 -0500 ulimit? The tradeoff here is whether to utilize virtual memory to allow gargantuan jobs to theoretically be processed at all. Seymour Cray nailed that in one when he was asked why his systems did not support virtual memory. It will always be possible to concoct queries and problems that cannot be solved within the limits of any arbitrary amount of real memory. And of course if you put in ulimit limitations and exceed them, then within some timeslice or interrupt that allows the kernel to figure that out the violating process gets killed. The side effects of the operating system killing Oracle processes is too complex to analyze in the general case. You mentioned that you had recently moved from 9i to 11gR2, but it is not clear to me whether your "analyst" had previously run the same query in 9i successfully. If so, *probably* it used an entirely different plan. Then again, I've often seen folks test limits on an upgraded system, for example in this context, by supplying a longer "in" list until something breaks. Those are the folks you hope to identify to play games on a "conference room pilot" or quality assurance test upgrade before you go live. Likewise, proper education to help them avoid unleashing experimental loads on the production system is usually part of the solution. Regards, mwf ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:18:45 -0800 Subject: Re: Killer SQL and PGA From: Greg Rahn <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> If you have a reproducible test case, open an SR and file a bug. Even though PGA memory management is controlled via a "target" not a "limit", overshooting it by a such a significant is clearly not the expected behavior. Be sure to include a test case builder archive for the problem statement and a SQL Monitor report. See: http://blogs.oracle.com/optimizer/entry/oracle_keeps_closing_my_tar_because_i_cannot_provide_a_testcase_can_you_help https://raw.github.com/grahn/oracle_scripts/master/tcb.sh http://structureddata.org/2008/01/06/oracle-11g-real-time-sql-monitoring-using-dbms_sqltunereport_sql_monitor/ ------------------------------ -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Robert Laverty Sent: Monday, January 30, 2012 6:13 PM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Killer SQL and PGA We had a problem with our PGA growing larger than physical memory, dragging the system down until we were forced to restart the database. We recently upgraded from 9i to 11gR2 on Solaris with 16Gb physical memory hosting an OLTP application. 4Gb is used for SGA and 400Mb for PGA_aggregate_target. AMM and ASMM have not been enabled. Workarea_size_policy is set to AUTO. This is a simple database. No RAC, no shared servers, no parallel processing. One of our analysts launched what appeared to be a simple ad hoc query: select * from deniedhist where icn in ('1', '2', '3', ... , 'x'). Unfortunately, the analyst had over 400 ICNs listed. DENIEDHIST is a UNION ALL view representing a faux-partitioned array of 129 tables, each with its own unique index on ICN. The execution plan (my comments included) shows that it is searching each underlying table 'x' number of times, using the unique index each time. This is the plan from a test version of the SQL with only 5 ICNs. The rest of the plan shows the iteration through the other 128 underlying tables (other views of the plan show the unique table and index names). 1422 SELECT STATEMENT REMOTE CHOOSE 1421 VIEW POS.DENIEDHIST 1420 UNION-ALL 11 CONCATENATION -- This is table 1 of 129 in the view 2 TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID POS.DENIED_HISTORY 1 INDEX UNIQUE SCAN UNIQUE POS.DENIED_HISTORY_ICN 4 TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID POS.DENIED_HISTORY 3 INDEX UNIQUE SCAN UNIQUE POS.DENIED_HISTORY_ICN 6 TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID POS.DENIED_HISTORY 5 INDEX UNIQUE SCAN UNIQUE POS.DENIED_HISTORY_ICN 8 TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID POS.DENIED_HISTORY 7 INDEX UNIQUE SCAN UNIQUE POS.DENIED_HISTORY_ICN 10 TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID POS.DENIED_HISTORY 9 INDEX UNIQUE SCAN UNIQUE POS.DENIED_HISTORY_ICN 22 CONCATENATION -- This is table 2 of 129 in the view ... I estimated that the original version probably had over 120,000 steps in its execution plan. It ran for nearly an hour until memory reached a critical point, almost 20 Gb and paging like mad, that required us to abort the database and restart. I can run the full original query on a standby machine which is physically identical but is still running 9i. It finishes in 5 minutes and the PGA only grows to 500 Mb. The execution plans, at least for the small test version of the query, are the same on both machines. I understand the problems with large 'IN' lists. There was a conversation on that topic here at the end of October . Educating the analyst and redesigning the query are secondary concerns. I also realize, after reading a bunch of Tom Kyte posts, that pga_aggregate_target will not constrain the growth of the PGA. My real question is why the 11g memory management, without AMM or ASMM, would allow the PGA to grow so large. In 15 years of operations, there must have been similar bad queries against the database. This happened a day after the 11g upgrade. Any suggestions? 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