Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Someone recently asked about a situation where they were trying to upgrade their database to 19c and as a part of their upgrade plan, they were trying to run fixed object statistics but it was going on forever, and they were totally clueless why and where its taking time. This being a mandatory step, they tried several times, but same result.

About fixed object stats, It is recommended that you re-gather them if you do a major database or application upgrade, implement a new module, or make changes to the database configuration. For example if you increase the SGA size then all of the X$ tables that contain information about the buffer cache and shared pool may change significantly, such as X$ tables used in v$buffer_pool or v$shared_pool_advice.

About fixed objects stats collection idle time, I mean anything between 1-10 minutes is I will say normal and average, but anything that goes beyond 20 minutes or even more or even in hours is abnormally high and points to a situation.

So, I was asked to take a look on ad-hoc basis and during the analysis I found a SQL trying to do a count all on unified_audit_trail, and was running from the same time since they called the DBMS_STATS for FIXED OBJECTS on the database. When asked, they told me that they’d enabled auditing on the database some 6 months back and haven’t purged anything since then, the audit trail had grown behemoth and has ~ 880 Million records. I immediately offered them two approaches to handle the situation – Either lock your unified table statistics (using dbms_stats.lock_table_stats) or else take backup of the table and purge audit records before calling the stats gathering job again. They agreed with the second approach, they took backup of audit table and purged audit trail. As soon as they purged audit table, the stats collection on fixed objects got finished in ~ 3 minutes.

This was the situation and what we did …

SQL> select * from dba_audit_mgmt_last_arch_ts;

AUDIT_TRAIL RAC_INSTANCE LAST_ARCHIVE_TS
-------------------- ------------ ------------------------------
STANDARD AUDIT TRAIL 0 22-MAY-22 06.00.00.000000 AM +00:00


SQL> select count(*) from aud$;

COUNT(*)
----------
885632817

BEGIN
DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT.clean_audit_trail(
audit_trail_type => DBMS_AUDIT_MGMT.AUDIT_TRAIL_AUD_STD,
use_last_arch_timestamp => FALSE);
END;
/

SQL> select count(*) from aud$;

COUNT(*)
----------
0


SQL> SET TIMING ON
SQL> BEGIN
DBMS_STATS.GATHER_FIXED_OBJECTS_STATS;
END;
/

Elapsed: 00:03:10.81

Hope It Helped!
Prashant Dixit