How to monitor a plsql block statement - plsql

I'm trying to figure out why insert and update statements take a lot longer to run on the production server versus the test server. I don't know how to go about monitoring the state of the block as it is running in SQL Developer. Something like a rownum plus sysdate output after so many rows have been inserted would be a good start.
Is there a way to output dbms_output.put_line statements while the block is running?
I am currently running SQL Developer 3.1.07 on Oracle 11g.
EDIT TO ADD SOLUTION:
PROCEDURE log_timestamp (
PI_trans_num number
) IS
PRAGMA AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION;
BEGIN
INSERT INTO timestamp_log (log_timestamp, trans_num)
VALUES (SYSTIMESTAMP, PI_trans_num);
COMMIT;
END log_timestamp;

One of the better ways of monitoring PL/SQL performance on a row-by-row basis is to use DBMS_Profiler, which will give you execution statistics for each row and how many times it executed.
It won't diagnose a SQL execution problem of course, but it will highlight how much of your execution time is spent on executing each statement.

Another method is to use DBMS_Application_Info.
You can add metadata to your session in v$session to share progress by setting "action name", and by maintaining progress reports through v$session_longops.

dbms_output.put_line statements will only be shown after the pl/sql block has been executed so they're not suitable for identifying problems while code is running.
If you want to keep track of long running processes you could log to a database table using an autonomous transaction (so you don't interfere with the current transaction) and monitor the logging table.
Taking an alternative approach, you could look at the explain plans for the insert and update statements being run on both the test and production servers. This might identify a difference on the production system which will explain the time difference.

Related

Why does this transaction produce a deadlock?

My application runs on Maria DB using a master-master Galera replication setup.
The application can handle deadlocks, but I've been working to minimize those that occur as they fill up my log files. There remains one transaction that gets regular deadlocks and I don't know how to avoid it.
The process deletes a record from one table, does a couple of operations on other tables and then finally inserts a record into the original table.
The transaction looks broadly like this:
1. DELETE FROM table_a WHERE `id` = 'Foo'
2. REPLACE INTO table_b ( ... )
3. UPDATE table_c SET ....
4. INSERT INTO table_a (id,...) VALUES ('Bar',...)
The final insert regularly gets a deadlock although retrying the transaction fixes it. What is it about this pattern that causes a deadlock? What can I do to reduce the occurrence?
Question: Is the 'deadlock' in the node you are writing to? Or does the deadlock not occur until COMMIT; that is, when trying to reconcile across the cluster?
If on the writing node...
As soon as possible in the transaction, do
SELECT id FROM table_a WHERE ... FOR UPDATE;
to signal what row(s) you will be inserting in step 4.
Also, consider changing REPLACE to an equivalent INSERT .. ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE ... I don't know if it will directly help with the deadlock, but at least it is (probably) more efficient.
If on the cluster...
Are you touching lots of different rows? Are you using roundrobin for picking which node to write to?
In any case, speeding up the transaction will help. Is there anything that can be pulled out of the transaction. Some thoughts there:
Normalization can generally be done in its own transaction.
If you have an "if" in the transaction, it might be worth it to do a tentative test beforehand. (But you probably need to keep the "if" in the transaction.)

Controlling read locks on table for multithreaded plsql execution

I have a driver table with a flag that determines whether that record has been processed or not. I have a stored procedure that reads the table, picks a record up using a cursor, does some stuff (inserts into another table) and then updates the flag on the record to say it's been processed. I'd like to be able to execute the SP multiple times to increase processing.
Obvious answer seemed to be to use 'for update skip locked' in the select for the cursor but it seems this means I cannot commit within the loop (to update the processed flag and commit my inserts) without getting the fetch out of sequence error.
Googling tells me Oracle's AQ is the answer but for the time being this option is not available to me.
Other suggestions? This must be a pretty common request but I've been unable to find anything that useful.
TIA!
A

SQL Server database hangs on trigger execution

We have implemented 6-7 trigger on a table and there are 4 update trigger out of these. All of the 4 triggers require long processing because of data manipulation and conditions. But whenever trigger executes then all the pages on the website stop responding and hangs for every other user from different systems also. Even when we execute update statement in SQL Server Management Studio on the trigger holding table then it also hangs. Can we resolve this hanging issue by shifting this trigger code into the stored procedure and call this stored procedures after update statement of the table?
Because I think trigger block the table access to the other user at the time of execution. If not then can anyone provide the solution over it.
Triggers are dangerous - they get fired whenever things happen, and you have no control over when and how often they fire.
You should definitely NOT do any time-consuming processing in a trigger! A trigger should be super fast, and lean.
If you need processing - let the trigger record the info needed into a separate "command" table, and have another process (e.g. a scheduled SQL Agent job) that checks that table for commands to be executed, and then executes those commands - separately, independently of the main application, in a separate execution path.
Don't block your main app by doing excessive data processing / manipulation in a trigger! That's the wrong place to do this!
Can we resolve this hanging issue by shifting this trigger code into the stored procedure
and call this stored procedures after update statement of the table?
You have a box that weights a ton. Does it get lighter when you put it into some nice packaging?
A trigger is already compiled. Putting it into a stored procedure is just dressing it up differently.
Your problem is that you abuse triggers to do heavy processing - something they should not do by design. Change the design.
Because I think trigger block the table access to the other user at the time of execution.
Well, triggers do NO SUCH THING - so you think wrong.
A trigger does what it is told to do and an empty trigger sets zero locks (the locks are there from whatever triggers it). If you do set up a table wide lock - fire whoever did that and redesign.
Triggers should be fast, light and be over fast. NO heavy processing in them.
Without actually seeing the triggers it's impossible to diagnose this confidently but here goes...
The TRIGGER won't set up a lock as such but if it sets off other UPDATE statements they'll require locks and if those UPDATE statements fire other triggers then you could have a chain reaction that produces the kind of grief you seem to be experiencing.
If that sounds like what might be happening then removing the triggers and doing the processing explicitly by running a stored procedure at the end may fix it. If the stored procedure is rubbish then you'll still have problems but at least they'll be easier to fix. Try to ensure that the Stored Procedure only updates the records that need updated
The main problem with shifting the functionality to a stored procedure that you run after the update is ensuring that it is in fact run every time.
If your asp.net skills are stronger than your T-SQL skills then this should be a far easier problem to solve than untangling a web of SQL triggers.
The other issue is that the between the update completing and the Stored Procedure completing the records will be in an intermediate state showing the initial change but not the remaining ones. This may or may not be a problem in your case

Sqlite3: How to interrupt a long running update without roll back?

I have a long running multirow update such as:
UPDATE T set C1 = calculation(C2) where C1 is NULL
If table is large this update may take many seconds or even minutes.
During this time all other queries on this table fail with "database is locked"
after connection timeout expires (currently my timeout is 5 seconds).
I would like to stop this update query after, say, 3 seconds,
then restart it. Hopefully, after several restarts entire table will be updated.
Another option is to stop this update query before making any other request
(this will require inter-process cooperation, but it may be doable).
But I cannot find a way to stop update query without rolling back
all previously updated records.
I tried calling interrupt and returning non-0 from progress_handler.
Both these approaches abort the update command
and roll back all the changes.
So, it appears that sqlite treats this update as a transaction,
which does not make much sense in this case because all rows are independent.
But I cannot start a new transaction for each row, can I?
If interrupt and progress_handler cannot help me, what else I can do?
I also tried UPDATE with LIMIT and also WHERE custom_condition(C1).
These approaches do allow me to terminate update earlier,
but they are significantly slower than regular update
and they cannot terminate the query at specific time
(before another connection timeout expires).
Any other ideas?
This multirow update is such a common operation
that, I hope, other people have a good solution for it.
So, it appears that sqlite treats this update as a transaction, which does not make much sense in this case because all rows are independent.
No, that actually makes perfect sense, because you're not executing multiple, independent updates. You're executing a single update statement. The fine manual says
No changes can be made to the database except within a transaction.
Any command that changes the database (basically, any SQL command
other than SELECT) will automatically start a transaction if one is
not already in effect. Automatically started transactions are
committed when the last query finishes.
If you can determine the range of keys involved, you can execute multiple update statements. For example, if a key is an integer, and you determine the range to be from 1 to 1,000,000, you can write code to execute this series of updates.
begin transaction;
UPDATE T set C1 = calculation(C2)
where C1 is NULL and your_key between 1 and 100000;
commit;
begin transaction;
UPDATE T set C1 = calculation(C2)
where C1 is NULL and your_key between 100001 and 200000;
commit;
Other possibilities . . .
You can sleep for a bit between transactions to give other queries a chance to execute.
You can also time execution using application code, and calculate a best guess at range values that will avoid timeouts and still give good performance.
You can select the keys for the rows that will be updated, and use their values to optimize the range of keys.
In my experience, it's unusual to treat updates this way, but it sounds like it fits your application.
But I cannot start a new transaction for each row, can I?
Well, you can, but it's probably not going to help. It's essentially the same as the method above, using a single key instead of a range. I wouldn't fire you for testing that, though.
On my desktop, I can insert 100k rows in 1.455 seconds, and update 100k rows with a simple calculation in 420 ms. If you're running on a phone, that's probably not relevant.
You mentioned poor performance with LIMIT. Do you have a lastupdated column with an index on it? At the top of your procedure you would get the COMMENCED_DATETIME and use it for every batch in the run:
update foo
set myvalue = 'x', lastupdated = UPDATE_COMMENCED
where id in
(
select id from foo where lastupdated < UPDATE_COMMENCED
limit SOME_REASONABLE_NUMBER
)
P.S. With respect to slowness:
I also tried UPDATE with LIMIT and also WHERE custom_condition(C1). These approaches do allow me to terminate update earlier, but they are significantly slower than regular update...
If you're willing to give other processes access to stale data, and your update is designed so as not to hog system resources, why is there a need to have the update complete within a certain amount of time? There seems to be no need to worry about perfomance in absolute terms. The concern should be relative to other processes -- make sure they're not blocked.
I also posted this question at
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.db.sqlite.general/81946
and got several interesting answers, such as:
divide range of rowid into slices and update one slice at a time
use AUTOINCREMENT feature to start new update at the place where the previous update ended (by LIMIT 10000)
create a trigger that calls select raise(fail, ...) to abort update without rollback

Optimizing select with transaction under SQLite 3

I read that wrapping a lot of SELECT into BEGIN TRANSACTION/COMMIT was an interesting optimization.
But are these commands really necessary if I use "PRAGMA journal_mode = OFF" before? (Which, if I remember, disables the log and obviously the transaction system too.)
Note that I don't agree with BigMacAttack.
For SQLITE, wrapping SELECTs in a Transaction does do something:
It reduces the number of SHARED locks that are obtained and then dropped.
Reference:
http://www.mail-archive.com/sqlite-users%40sqlite.org/msg79839.html
So I think the transaction would also be beneficial even if you had journal_mode turned off, because there is still the locking overhead to consider.
Maybe read_uncommitted would be something you could consider - I would guess that it would disable the SHARED locking.
"Use transactions – even if you’re just reading the data. This may yield a few milliseconds."
I'm not sure where the Katashrophos.net blog is getting this information, but wrapping SELECT statements in transactions does nothing. Transactions are always and only used when making changes to the database, and transactions cannot be disabled. They are a requirement. What many don't understand is that unless you manually BEGIN and COMMIT a transaction, each statement will be automatically put in their own unique transaction. Be sure to read the de facto SO question on improving sqlite performance. What the author of the blog might have been trying to say, is that if you plan to do an INSERT, then a SELECT, then another INSERT, then it would increase performance to manually wrap these statements in a single transaction. Otherwise sqlite will automatically put the two insert statements in separate unique transactions.
According to the "SQL as Understood by SQLite" documentation concerning transactions:
"No changes can be made to the database except within a transaction. Any command that changes the database (basically, any SQL command other than SELECT) will automatically start a transaction if one is not already in effect."
Lastly, disabling journaling via PRAGMA journal_mode = OFF does not disable transactions, only logging. But disabling the log is a good way to increase performance as well. Normally after each transaction, sqlite will document the transaction in the journal. When it doesn't have to do this, you get a performance boost.
UPDATE:
So it has been brought to my attention by "elegant dice" that the SQLite documentation statement I quote above is misleading. SELECT statements do in fact use the transaction system. This is used to acquire and release a SHARED lock on the database. As a result, it is indeed more efficient to wrap multiple SELECT statements in a single transaction. By doing so, the lock is only acquired and released once, rather than for each individual SELECT statement. This ends up being slightly more efficient while also assuring that all SELECT statements will access the same version of the database in case something has been added/deleted by some other program.

Resources