How to tune Oracle application packages’ SQL such as Siebel, PeopleSoft, and SAP

Introduction

Application package software is a collection of software programs that is developed for the purpose of being licensed to third-party organizations. Although a package software may be tailored for a user's specific needs through parameters or tables, the software itself is not developed specifically for an organization. So, users do not own the source code and have no way to modify the embedded SQL statements for performance tuning purpose. There are a lot of application packages built on Oracle RDBMS such as Siebel, PeopleSoft JD Edwards, SAP and so on. In order to help application packages’ users, Oracle provides some features for helping users to tune their SQL statements without the need to change their source code.


SQL profile

It is a profile generated by Oracle SQL Tuning Advisor. A SQL profile contains corrections for wrongly estimated statistics, auxiliary information. Therefore, SQL profile just guides the optimizer to a better plan, but they do not guarantee the same plan each time the statement is parsed. For certain SQL statements, no matter how good the statistics are corrected, Oracle SQL optimizer is still not able to generate a better plan in specific environments. For these kinds of SQL statements, human intervention is necessary, but SQL profile is not a convenient tool for developers to force Oracle to pick up a new plan without changing the program source code.



SQL plan baselines and stored outlines

Due to the Oracle environment changes or Oracle database version upgrade, it might target Oracle SQL optimizer to generate new plans for certain SQL statements. If it is not good, and we need something to preserve the old plans for the new environment. To achieve SQL plan stability, stored outlines was the major tool in earlier releases of Oracle Database. This feature is still supported in Oracle Database 11g; however, it might be depreciated in the future releases and replaced by SQL plan management. The mechanism of SQL Plan Baselines is to preserve the performance of specified SQL statements, regardless of changes in the database environment or release upgrade. Furthermore, create Plan Baselines manually for a SQL statement is possible, and this technique can help developers to guide Oracle SQL optimizer to generate a specific plan for a bad performance SQL statement. So, when Oracle SQL optimizer receive the same SQL statement next time, a better performance plan will be composed according to the new plan baselines stored in database. There is no need to change the SQL syntax in source programs.

For example, if you want to tune a SQL with execution plan-A that is currently used by Oracle SQL optimizer in your database, and you want to tune the SQL with Hints to make Oracle SQL optimizer to generate a new execution plan-B. What you have to do is to execute the tuned SQL with new Hints and use the following method provided by Oracle:

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