Re: Question RE: increasing sort_area_size

In article <33832E1F.F340B65A_at_west.com>, sshaw_at_west.com says...
>
>I am new to the business of Oracle DBA work. A very capable DBA just
>recently left our company and I was chosen to replace him. We are
>running Oracle 7.3 on an MS Windows NT 4.0 platform. I ran a tuning
>report script I got from a book, and it tells me that I am executing
>only a little over half of my query sorts in memory, with the rest
>obviously being done on disk.
>
>The report suggests that I increase the SORT_AREA_SIZE parameter. After
>investigating, I found that this parameter was not specified in our
>INIT.ORA file. Here are my questions:
>(1) Some Oracle documentation that I have read tells me that the
>INIT.ORA file is only read by Oracle when the database is first created,
>not when it is started up after a shutdown. Is this true?

Its read during startup.

> Is there a way
>around this (I noticed that in Oracle Instance Manager, this parameter
>seems to be editable, and help hints that it will be commited to the
>init.ora file the next time I stop and restart the database)?

Not relevent, cuz read at startup.

>(2) What should my criteria be for determining the new value for this
>parameter? I have not found any information on this subject in the
>Oracle documentation.
>
>I have included the pertinant section of the tuning report below:

We had a sort problem with a specific query and used the amount of temp tablespace used in the sort to gauge the size of the Sort_area.

One could use a 'binary search'/trial-and-error approach to get at the optimum value; using the tuning parms to view the results.

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Scott Overby                    E-mail  scott.overby_at_sdsdata.com
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