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Writer's picturekyle Hailey

Lab128 : secret DBA performance tool

I’ve mentioned lab 128 before but I have to mentioned it again. Every DBA should know about this tool. It’s the fastest way to connect to an Oracle database and get some hard core performance information nicely visualized graphically.

Lab 128 starts up in seconds, like 1 or 2 seconds. Its super fast and light weight but powerful.  My older version only took 10M of RAM. The newest version is about 47M but still as fast as ever.

Lab128 can be used to monitor 15-20 instances. Lab 128 keeps  13-14 hours of performance data in memory, and last 60 days on the disk. Monitoring that many instances for that long takes around 800-900 MB of RAM and well less than  10% of the CPU on a laptop.

Below is my favorite screen, the “Activity Explorer” page which is somewhat like the top Activity screen in OEM but it shows both the data from ASH and the data from wait events, so you can compare the two. The ASH data can be collected by the tool avoiding the diagnostics and performance pack license or if you have the license it can connect to ASH from the database views.

You can monitor several databases at a time

Here is the top session screen showing session state, session types and for active queries, the estimated completion % for the query.

Cool maraige of  unix top and v$sessions:

buffer cache explorer

lock monitor

  1. Alert File Viewer

  2. 10053 trace viewer

  3. Clusterware monitor

Much more.

Check out the website at http://www.lab128.com

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