Oracle Virtual Technology Symposium: Download

For all those who attended my session today in Oracle Virtual Technology Summit on InMemory, thank you very much. Some questions were cut off towards the end since it was an automated session. I will be happy to answer, if your question was in that category.
Since this was an on-demand show, you can watch the replay anytime by visiting this site. Remember, this requires a connection to watch; it's not a download. You can download the slides from here and the scripts I used in the demo here.

Please post the questions you couldn't do during the webinar.

Cache Buffer Chains Demystified

You must have seen sessions waiting on the event “latch: cache buffers chains” from time to time. If you ever wondered what this means and how you can reduce time spent on it, read on. Here you will learn how buffer cache works, how Oracle multi-versioning works, how buffers are allocated and deallocated, what hash chain is and how buffers are linked to it, what the role of cache buffer chain latch is and why sessions wait on it, how to find the objects causing the contention and how to reduce the time spent on that event.

While exploring the reasons for the slowness in database sessions, you check the wait interface and see the following output:

 SQL> select state, event from v$session where sid = 123;

STATE   EVENT
 ------- ---------------------------
 WAITING latch: cache buffers chains

This event is more common, especially in applications that perform a scan of a few blocks of data. To resolve it, you should understand what the cache buffers chains latch is and why sessions have to wait on it. To understand that you must understand how the Oracle buffer cache works. We will explore these one by one, and close with the solution to reducing the cache buffers chains latch waits.