Awr

Is your SYSAUX tablespace way too large? If you think your SYSAUX tablespace is too big, it may be that AWR is leaving behind stuff that it should have deleted. Doc ID 2099998.1 on Oracle Support describes the problem. The database deletes snapshots that are older than the configured retention. But sometimes, if the process gets interrupted, it may leave some orphan data behind. Ensure you are correctly licensed before you start querying the AWR tables; it requires the diagnostic management pack (AFAIK, but I have not worked for years on an enterprise database without all the management packs licensed). You can use the script $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/awrinfo.sql to check how much space the various components of AWR occupy. ...

This post is a mixture of experiences from a recent project and an overview on how to use RAT in a project. Real Application Testing (RAT) is a licensed feature for the Enterprise Edition (EE) of the Oracle database. It was released on 11g, but can be used to test migration of databases from 9i and 10g to 11g (assuming that the source databases have a required version/patch). The term Real is, I reckon, used to hint at a more authentic testing process. The tests are executed based on a capture from a real production system. ...

Went to five presentations, two of them stood out. Doug Burn spoke about SQL plan management in 11g and I learned some new tricks. The material and the content was quite good, also I like these comments that may not be in the slides, e.g. he quoted Jonathan Lewis who said that if you have a narrow problem you should apply a narrow solution, an advice against changing a system wide parameter just because you have one SQL statement gone astray. ...