Paul Karman

Don't go into debt for AWR and use Statspack

It is easy as pie to start using AWR and it is promoted as "the tool" for solving all your performance problems, it only costs you an arm and a leg.

The alternative is a lot less attractive, you need to do lots of things yourself, behind the command prompt. And even before you are there you need to do a conciderable amount of reading.

This page contains the tools I use to find SQL language based performance problems without activating options that need additional license fees.

Note: this is not about instance tuning. Nothing about memory settings, disk-IO and CPU cycles. A badly written SQL statment can do even the biggest, bad-ass machine in. The KIWI (kill it with iron) tactics realy comes second to SQL tuning.

Statspack installation procedure.
Statspack unix korn-shell menu explanation .
Korn shell menu script.
Interpreting the statspack results.
How to find and protect yourself against unwanted AWR license fees.