RE: ORA-06508 and the Shared Pool sizing

In the past when we modified an object that invalidated a package and would then recompile the package sessions that had previous called the package prior to the update and which then called the package again after the update would get an error that stated "package state has changed".  

I just discovered that on 9.2.0.5 running on AIX 5.2 that the 06508 message is now issued instead. In this case the user session needs to reconnect and the problem will go away.  

HTH -- Mark D Powell --  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Powell, Mark D
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2005 12:50 PM
To: robyn.sands_at_gmail.com; oracle-l_at_freelists.org Subject: RE: ORA-06508 and the Shared Pool sizing

The ORA-06508 error means Oracle could not find enough contiguous memory in the shared pool to load the referenced package into. The shared pool becomes fragmented over time and even though Oracle can load packages into multiple non-contiguous chunks of memory the rdbms still must find large contiguous space for certain structures required by the code. You can generally avoid this problem by doing the following:  

1 - in your production environment do not make object changes where dependencies exist from large stored procedures and/or packages except during a maintenance window  

2 - flush the pool and immediately recompile all invalidated code after making a change  

3 - limit the size of any package or procedure using two or three smaller routines if necessary  

4 - use dbms_keep to pin all large packages immediately after database startup  

HTH -- Mark D Powell --  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Robyn
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2005 12:08 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: ORA-06508 and the Shared Pool sizing

Hello everyone,

We've run into a new issue and I'm curious as to how 'normal' this might be. We have a new/upgraded application in test. User testing was scheduled to start yesterday but one trigger was failing. This trigger calls a procedure owned by another user and had worked in the past. It is an 'after update' trigger and the procedure populates a status table, but resulted in ORA-06508: PL/SQL: could not find program unit being called.

The developers worked through all the stuff they knew to check (permissions, full identificiation of the objects, etc) to no avail. The procedure and trigger appeared to be valid, but compiling the trigger caused the procedure to go invalid. Procedure could be recompiled but the trigger still didn't work.

I searched at Metalink and found several documents referrencing this error for various Oracle applications, while the docs specific to the database all mentioned the same stuff that had already been tried.

The Oracle applications docs stated that the shared pool was too small and needed to be increased. Seemed odd to me since the error mentioned not finding a program unit, but these were the only docs that referenced receiving just this error. In every other case, there was a related error message was mentioned.

So, I shutdown the database, increase the shared pool by 128M (or 33%) and the procedure worked. However a later attempt to recompile again broke the procedure. This time the database was restarted without an increase in the shared pool and again, the procedure worked.

We're going to test a few things later when the users get off the system, but this seems really odd. The database is on HP-UX not WinDoze, so I should not have to play the restart game to fix a problem. Has anyone seem a similar problem? I am planning to open a TAR if it repeats but I can't test again until tonight.

TIA ... Robyn

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