Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Few of the readers after my last post asked me – What are those strange columns named ‘OMem’, ‘1Mem’ and ‘O/1/M’ or ‘Used-Mem’ in execution plan ? This is something what you will see in the execution plan if called the DBMS_XPLAN using ‘+memstats’ or the ‘+allstats’ options.

----------------------------           -----------------------------
|  OMem |  1Mem |  O/1/M   |   OR      |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem   |
----------------------------           -----------------------------

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SQL> SELECT * FROM table(DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY_CURSOR('0m329sngnhv1p', 0, 'ALLSTATS'));

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SQL_ID  0m329sngnhv1p, child number 0
-------------------------------------
SELECT /*+ gather_plan_statistics */ * FROM (xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Plan hash value: xxxxxx

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                                  | Name     | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |  OMem |  1Mem | O/1/M|
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                           |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |        |     15 |00:00:00.62 |     353K|       |       |      |
|*  1 |  FILTER                                    |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |        |     15 |00:00:00.62 |     353K|       |       |      |
|*  2 |   VIEW                                     |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |   5530 |     15 |00:00:00.62 |     353K|       |       |      |
|   3 |    SORT ORDER BY                           |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |   5530 |   7873 |00:00:00.62 |     353K|   549K|   457K| 1/0/0|
|   4 |     COUNT                                  |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |        |   7873 |00:00:00.46 |     353K|       |       |      |
|   5 |      NESTED LOOPS                          |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |   5530 |   7873 |00:00:00.46 |     353K|       |       |      |
|   6 |       NESTED LOOPS                         |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |   5530 |    266K|00:00:00.44 |     240K|       |       |      |
|   7 |        NESTED LOOPS                        |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |   5530 |    266K|00:00:00.19 |   46039 |       |       |      |
|*  8 |         TABLE ACCESS FULL                  |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |   4392 |     90 |00:00:00.01 |     878 |       |       |      |
|   9 |         TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED|xxxxxxxx  |     90 |      1 |    266K|00:00:00.17 |   45161 |       |       |      |
|* 10 |          INDEX RANGE SCAN                  |xxxxxxxx  |     90 |      1 |    266K|00:00:00.04 |    3871 |       |       |      |
|* 11 |        INDEX UNIQUE SCAN                   |xxxxxxxx  |    266K|      1 |    266K|00:00:00.20 |     194K|       |       |      |
|* 12 |       TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID          |xxxxxxxx  |    266K|      1 |   7873 |00:00:00.20 |     113K|       |       |      |
|  13 |        TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID BATCHED |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |       |       |      |
|* 14 |         INDEX RANGE SCAN                   |xxxxxxxx  |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       1 |       |       |      |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

First talking about column ‘Starts’, that is the number of times that operation actually happened. The column with title ‘Buffers’ refers to the amount of buffer read/write (IO) performed. Now comes the column ‘OMem’, and it is the memory estimate needed to perform the operation in memory only. This is also called the optimal execution.
Next column with title ‘1Mem’ is the memory estimate needed to perform the operation in a single pass (Read/Write from disk (temp) only once), called one-pass execution. A multi-pass execution is when the same data is written to and read from disk more than once. Think about the sorting, where the database has to do a sort on large amount data in a small PGA or sort area.

Last column with title ‘0/1/M’ and sometimes ‘Used-Mem‘ is the ACTUAL amount of memory used for the operation. You also see some numbers in the brackets for this column. There is a significance for them – If the number is 0, then it was an optimal execution, used only memory and no temporary space. If the number is 1, then it was a one-pass execution. If the number is > 1, it was a multi-pass execution, and that number represents the number of passes.

Hope It Helped!
Prashant Dixit