Thursday, March 18, 2010

Oracle instance slow startup

Recently we noticed one of our production database take longer than usual to startup.
In some cases, it took 3 to 4 hours for alter database open to complete.
The case is particularly bad for our TEST and DEV database after they got refreshed with production. Our production is very powerful 32 CPUs box, when production took like 20 to 30 minutes to open. TEST and DEV will take hours.


Sat Feb 27 06:48:55 2010
alter database open
-snip-
Sat Feb 27 09:54:22 2010
Completed: alter database open


We engaged Oracle support and they suggested to do a trace.

SQL> conn / as sysdba
SQL> startup mount
SQL> alter session set events '10046 trace name context forever, level 12';
SQL> alter database open;
Once the instance is opened, immediately turn off the 10046 tracing through that session.
SQL> alter session set events '10046 trace name context off';


The trace revealed that, database is querying two advanced queue tables used by STREAMS. The two tables are highly fragmented, for example table aq$_qt_cap_st_D had just 150 records and had 8000 + extents.


strmadmin.aq$_qt_cap_st_p
strmadmin.aq$_qt_cap_st_d


For TEST and DEV we can easily go around the issue by truncating the two tables because we are not using STREAMS on them. For production, table re-org are in order, for that we choose to use Online Redefinition.