Category: 11gR1, 11gR2

August 29

Undocumented stuff is always very interesting, although there is of course a reason why it is undocumented… Event settings are more or less in this category. They are often used by Oracle Support in their quest to do a good job solving our problems.

Sometimes events disable or enable features. Sometimes they trace internal processes. The later can be very helpful like setting the infamous “10046” event. I noticed some event settings that can be helpful while using XMLDB or the Protocol Server.

Here a small overview of some events that are in the manuals or mentioned during discussions on the OTN XMLDB Forum… Be careful while “playing” with these events. Some are mentioned in the XMLDB Developers Guide and not an big issue, others can cause very strange results or abnormal behavior.

So be advised…

July 30

Hmmm, still busy to setup a baseline environment to do some serious XMLDB performance / architecture testing. I am almost now on the point were I really can start, but until now I ran into a lot of issues… It also told me that the mediawiki dumpfile is good set of XML data to work with. A lot of variance is build in. I hope I won’t encounter too muchmore issues though…

July 20

While setting up a baseline for my XMLDB performance tests, I noticed that my “count(*)” on a Binary XML table (using Securefile LOB storage) called “WIKI_STAGE” took an awful long time. So long, that I even had to kill the SQL*Plus session, that was executing the “count(*)”. I started wondering. Why did it take so long to come up with the result?

In the end, due to good advice from Jonathan Lewis, I came up with a solution (although probably unsupported) and a better understanding off the mechanics involved. Also, as a side effect, it triggered a really good discussion on the “Oracle-L” freelist, regarding “counting”.

But lets start from the beginning…