Using STATSPACK package

[roukie_dba]

Hi
I am trying to find out where the STATSPACK tuning tool is located in my Oracle8.1.7 server, as well as instructions on how to use it. Not much luck in Oracle Documentation - can someone help me please?
Thanks a lot!

[julian]

Oracle High-Performance Tuning with STATSPACK by Donald Burleson ISBN: 0072133783

[roukie_dba]

Julian
Thanks, I just downloaded a series of nice articles on it from Metalink!

[julian]

You are welcome! STATSPACK is a very good tool.

[sambavan]

Julian, what is your opinion on that book? How deep does it go? Does it talk on different measures one would have to take on tuning the shared_pool or like all the books, does it say if the hit is down, increase your pool size?

Sam

[julian]

The book is realy meant for advanced tuning, which is the part of Oracle I am most interested in. What is useful are the scripts which contain the info you need for tuning.

Increase your pool size, yep :-) I have to check on that...

[marist89]

Originally posted by sambavan
what is your opinion on that book? How deep does it go?

It's OK, but not great. Experienced DBAs will find little new information in this book except how to setup statspack. The author does go through all the table definitions, so that's helpful.

Most of the information in the book is readily available on Technet and Metalink. Most Sr. Level DBAs already have the tools in place to monitor the metrics that this book sets up. If you are a beginning DBA this book will give you a good background to setup a monitoring framework quickly.

[sambavan]

I'm keen in looking out for the caveats. Most of the books that are on the shelfs, talke about how to gather the metrics and then straighly they say if the hits are low, go and increase the appropriate pool size. To me its a very lame way. I would always look for all the other possible things that could cause the problem before increasing the pool size. Like your query, are they pinned, are they indexed, their stats, the tablespace allocations, etc and etc. These thing would greatly degrade your performance, even if you increase your pool. This is something I have not found on many of the books.

Since I couldn't find this book on the shelfs here, I was looking to know how the author had organized this book.

Sam