Donald K. Burleson Oracle Tips

New Oracle views for automatic PGA RAM memory management

Oracle has introduced several new views and new columns in existing views to aid in viewing the internal allocation of RAM memory in Oracle. The following new v$ views can be used to monitor RAM memory usage of dedicated Oracle connections.

• v$process – Three new columns are added in Oracle for monitoring PGA memory usage.  The new columns are called pga_used_mem, pga_alloc_mem and pga_max_mem.

• v$sysstat – There are many new statistics rows, including work area statistics for optimal, one-pass and multi-pass.

• v$pgastat – This new view shows internals of PGA memory usage for all background processes and dedicated connections.

• v$sql_plan – This exciting new view contains execution plan information for all currently executing SQL.  This is a tremendous tool for the performance tuning processional who must locate sub-optimal SQL statements.

• v$workarea – This new view provides detailed cumulative statistics on Ram memory usage for Oracle connections.

• v$workarea_active – This new view show internal RAM memory usage information for all currently executing SQL statements.

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