Thursday, November 10, 2011

ORA-4031 Tool by Oracle

Whenever I get the dreaded ORA-600 or ORA-7445 error, my first stop is the ORA-600 troubleshooting tool at the My Oracle Support:

153788.1 - Troubleshoot an ORA-600 or ORA-7445 Error Using the Error Lookup Tool

Just give the first parameter given along with the ORA-600 tool, and get the initial information about the bug, its patch or the workaround, and you would be  more informed in opening the SR with the Oracle, if need be.

Another not-so-pleasant error to deal with for the DBAs and the Developers is ORA-4031 memory error. This error also throws itself out of database with different parameters and often with different memory pools. Some bloggers out there have good use cases in resolving these issues, but it seems that they are not still enough, and more often than not even SR get stale while resolving these errors.

Increasing the shared pool and/or throwing more memory might, I would repeat, might resolve the issue for a brief period, but it would return for sure. Proper memory configuration at the Operating system level (think huge pages) and the database level coupled with tuned SQL is the way to go. But that is a broad area, and this newly introduced tool by Oracle, the ORA-4031 is a good step in narrowing down this issue.

But it is very nascent and innocent right now but very promising. Search "ORA-4031 Troubleshooting Tool" in MOS, and it should be the top most find.