How do I troubleshoot performance problems with an Oracle SQL statement

Question

I have two insert statements, almost exactly the same, which run in two different schemas on the same Oracle instance. What the insert statement looks like doesn't matter - I'm looking for a troubleshooting strategy here.

Both schemas have 99% the same structure. A few columns have slightly different names, other than that they're the same. The insert statements are almost exactly the same. The explain plan on one gives a cost of 6, the explain plan on the other gives a cost of 7. The tables involved in both sets of insert statements have exactly the same indexes. Statistics have been gathered for both schemas.

One insert statement inserts 12,000 records in 5 seconds.

The other insert statement inserts 25,000 records in 4 minutes 19 seconds.

The number of records being insert is correct. It's the vast disparity in execution times that confuses me. Given that nothing stands out in the explain plan, how would you go about determining what's causing this disparity in runtimes?

(I am using Oracle 10.2.0.4 on a Windows box).

Edit: The problem ended up being an inefficient query plan, involving a cartesian merge which didn't need to be done. Judicious use of index hints and a hash join hint solved the problem. It now takes 10 seconds. Sql Trace / TKProf gave me the direction, as I it showed me how many seconds each step in the plan took, and how many rows were being generated. Thus TKPROF showed me:-

Rows     Row Source Operation
-------  ---------------------------------------------------
  23690  NESTED LOOPS OUTER (cr=3310466 pr=17 pw=0 time=174881374 us)
  23690   NESTED LOOPS  (cr=3310464 pr=17 pw=0 time=174478629 us)
2160900    MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN (cr=102 pr=0 pw=0 time=6491451 us)
   1470     TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID TBL1 (cr=57 pr=0 pw=0 time=23978 us)
   8820      INDEX RANGE SCAN XIF5TBL1 (cr=16 pr=0 pw=0 time=8859 us)(object id 272041)
2160900     BUFFER SORT (cr=45 pr=0 pw=0 time=4334777 us)
   1470      TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID TBL1 (cr=45 pr=0 pw=0 time=2956 us)
   8820       INDEX RANGE SCAN XIF5TBL1 (cr=10 pr=0 pw=0 time=8830 us)(object id 272041)
  23690    MAT_VIEW ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID TBL2 (cr=3310362 pr=17 pw=0 time=235116546 us)
  96565     INDEX RANGE SCAN XPK_TBL2 (cr=3219374 pr=3 pw=0 time=217869652 us)(object id 272084)
      0   TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID TBL3 (cr=2 pr=0 pw=0 time=293390 us)
      0    INDEX RANGE SCAN XIF1TBL3 (cr=2 pr=0 pw=0 time=180345 us)(object id 271983)

Notice the rows where the operations are MERGE JOIN CARTESIAN and BUFFER SORT. Things that keyed me into looking at this were the number of rows generated (over 2 million!), and the amount of time spent on each operation (compare to other operations).

Answer 1

Use the SQL Trace facility and TKPROF.

Answer 2

The main culprits in insert slow downs are indexes, constraints, and oninsert triggers. Do a test without as many of these as you can remove and see if it's fast. Then introduce them back in and see which one is causing the problem.

I have seen systems where they drop indexes before bulk inserts and rebuild at the end -- and it's faster.

Answer 3

The first thing to realize is that, as the documentation says, the cost you see displayed is relative to one of the query plans. The costs for 2 different explains are not comparable. Secondly the costs are based on an internal estimate. As hard as Oracle tries, those estimates are not accurate. Particularly not when the optimizer misbehaves. Your situation suggests that there are two query plans which, according to Oracle, are very close in performance. But which, in fact, perform very differently.

The actual information that you want to look at is the actual explain plan itself. That tells you exactly how Oracle executes that query. It has a lot of technical gobbeldy-gook, but what you really care about is knowing that it works from the most indented part out, and at each step it merges according to one of a small number of rules. That will tell you what Oracle is doing differently in your two instances.

What next? Well there are a variety of strategies to tune bad statements. The first option that I would suggest, if you're in Oracle 10g, is to try their SQL tuning advisor to see if a more detailed analysis will tell Oracle the error of its ways. It can then store that plan, and you will use the more efficient plan.

If you can't do that, or if that doesn't work, then you need to get into things like providing query hints, manual stored query outlines, and the like. That is a complex topic. This is where it helps to have a real DBA. If you don't, then you'll want to start reading the documentation, but be aware that there is a lot to learn. (Oracle also has a SQL tuning class that is, or at least used to be, very good. It isn't cheap though.)

Answer 4

I've put up my general list of things to check to improve performance as an answer to another question:

Favourite performance tuning tricks

... It might be helpful as a checklist, even though it's not Oracle-specific.