On Thu, 22 Jul 2004 16:34:17 -0600, Wolfgang Breitling <breitliw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > At 01:55 PM 7/22/2004, you wrote: > > >take note of how many records you add to relatively *small* tables. 13 > >rows added to one of our tables caused hell until we gathered stats > >again (and it took ages for anyone to admit that anything ahd > >changed). That would be 13 rows in the sense of another financial year > >to add to the 2 existing ones - so hardly significant at all :). > > Can you give more details on that and why 13 more rows caused hell until > stats were gathered again. What were the execution plans before and after? > Were there histograms involved? I knew someone would ask that. Unfortunately this will have to be anecdotal evidence since it was 18 months ago. I was trying to be ironic about the significance of the change. The table was a table of valid periods it did have 26 rows in it before the change, after the change it had 39 rows in it ( 3 years worth of financial periods not 2). I think it ought to be obvious that adding 50% more records to a table is worth telling the optimizer about. My point is that the administrators of the system who made this change swore blind that nothing had changed and there was a big problem with the database. From their point of view I think this was not unreasonable, it was a small routine change. Now I'm arguing out of experience rather than theory here, but it seems to me that this pattern of thinking a significant change is insignificant is likely to happen with small tables a lot more frequently than with large ones. Hence my suggestion to pay special attention to the small tables. I think Jonathan has already mentioned that small stats errors will likely have a larger effect when made on small tables rather than large ones. I'd be a little wary of monitor/gather stale which is what Donald was suggesting for small tables when we know that these are sensitive to changes, that gathering accurate stats on them is really cheap. > Whenever you drastically change your operations - going from RBO to CBO, > going from nightly/weekly gather to no-gather with exceptions, going from > no system stats to system stats, or vice-versa is always a big risk and > should be tested very thoroughly. Fortunately there are the export stats procedures in dbms_stats to alleviate this risk somewhat. -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------