Wednesday, May 8, 2013

New Version Of XPLAN_ASH Tool - Video Tutorial

A new major release (version 3.0) of my XPLAN_ASH tool is available for download.

You can download the latest version here.

In addition to many changes to the way the information is presented and many other smaller changes to functionality there is one major new feature: XPLAN_ASH now also supports S-ASH, the free ASH implementation.

If you run XPLAN_ASH in a S-ASH repository owner schema, it will automatically detect that and adjust accordingly.

XPLAN_ASH was tested against the latest stable version of S-ASH (2.3). There are some minor changes required to that S-ASH release in order to function properly with XPLAN_ASH. Most of them will be included in the next S-ASH release as they really are only minor and don't influence the general S-ASH functionality at all.

If you're interested in using XPLAN_ASH with an existing S-ASH installation get in touch with me so I can provide the necessary scripts that apply the necessary changes.

Rather than writing another lengthy blog post about the changes and new features introduced I thought I start a multi-part video tutorial where I explain the purpose of the tool and how to use it based on the new version - some parts of the tutorial will focus on specific functionality of the tool and are therefore probably also quite useful as some kind of general tutorial on that Oracle feature and SQL execution troubleshooting guide in general.

The tutorial will consist of six parts initially, the first two are already available on my Youtube channel - the next ones to follow over time.

Part 1: Introduction, Overview

Part 2: Usage, Parameters, Invocation

Part 3: Rowsource Statistics: TBD

Part 4: Active Session History: TBD

Part 5: Systematic Parallel Execution Skew Analysis & Troubleshooting: Coming Soon

Part 6: Experimental Stuff, Script Configuration And Internals: TBD

Feel free to post questions/requests for clarification that are not covered in the tutorials in the comments section - if there are topics of general interest I might publish a seventh part addressing those questions.


In future I might use that video style more often since it's a nicer way of conveying certain kind of information.