Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Q:  How do I make the SQL screen in TOAD remember more history of queries? A:  There is a setting in TOAD Options --> SQL Editor called "# of SQL Statements to save ".... Q:  How do I click a button and have TOAD turn my query into Java Code? A:  There is a setting in TOAD Options --> SQL Editor called "Make Code Format" and from there you can chose Java, VB, C++, Delphi or PERL Q:  How do I make the SQL History list in Toad show more text of each query? A:  Q:  How do I make the dropdown list labeled "SQL Contains:" remember my past searches? A:  Q:  How can I make a long running query in TOAD run in the background so I can use TOAD for other things? A:   There is a setting in TOAD Options --> SQL Editor called "Process Queries in threads/ allow queries to be cancled.  Check this and you will be able to open other windows in TOAD. 9:57:17 AM    comment []

I went to the Twin Cities Oracle Users Group last Wednesday.  It was very valuable.  A lot of it was writing down terms the presenters threw out so that I could look them up later.  Thomas Kyte of Oracle's Ask Tom presented about Oracle Performance for about two hours.  The most valuable thing I learned from him is the importance keeping stats over time so you can document performance changes.  He spoke highly of three performance monitoring tools:  statspack, tkprof and autotrace.  I would recommend seeing this guy speak if you ever get the chance.  The other speaker was John Goodhue of the local group.  He gave a great presentation that meshed nicely with Tom's.  He focused on row chaining.  I had never considered row chaining before, but it works like this:  you have a block in Oracle that contains many records.  The block is stuffed full of records, as a matter of fact and many of those records are kind of empty.  That means they might have an ID field filled in and maybe a customer name, but many of the fields are empty.  When the those fields get filled in later, the records don't fit in the block any more.  Then Oracle has to place those records in new blocks and this impacts performance.  You can prevent this from happening by setting the pctfree parameter to something greater than 10, which is the default.  That tells Oracle to make the blocks bigger.  The other thing I got from his presentation is that the famous buffer cache hit ratio that we all worry about can be misleading at best.  There are lots of other statistics that are more important.  This topic is a research project in itself and I won't try to recreate all the stuff I learned here (can't read my notes) but the message is that these user groups are worth attending.  There were about 200 people there.  8:12:52 AM    comment []