Release Information

Spotlight on Oracle Standard, RAC and Xpert Editions

Hardware requirements

• 1.2 GHz Pentium-based or equivalent PC
• 150 megabytes of free disk space
• 512 megabytes of RAM (minimum) (1GB recommended)
• Monitor capable of supporting resolution of 1024x768 or larger

Software requirements

New Features in Spotlight on Oracle Standard Edition v5.0

• Enhanced Top SQL drilldown -Enhanced Top SQL drilldown for improved diagnostics available with Oracle 9.0.2 and later, while still providing a full range of diagnostics for earlier versions of Oracle.
• SQL Analyze Trace drilldown - Allows for viewing the contents of the Oracle trace files that show how Oracle is processing SQL statements for the database under investigation, and how resources are being used to execute those statements (Oracle 9.2.0.4 and later).
• DTrace drilldown - Dynamic analysis tool for Solaris 10 operating systems. Spotlight can now use DTrace to capture details of the interaction between Oracle and the operating system when Oracle uses the O/S services provided by Solaris.
• Continued Fetch diagnostics - Alarm raised when the additional I/O rate caused by row chaining (also known as row fragmentation) adds significantly to the overall I/O rate. Row chaining occurs when an update to a row causes the row length to exceed the amount of free space in the data block. The row is "chained" to another block, and index lookups to that row must then perform additional I/O to "continue" to the chained block. Spotlight will identify tables and SQL statements that appear to be contributing most heavily to row migration. These tables may need to be rebuilt, possibly with a higher PCTFREE value.
• Array Fetch diagnostics - Alarm raised when the array fetch size used by applications that access the database may be too low. Oracle client libraries support the ability to retrieve multiple rows from the database in a single operation. When more than one row is retrieved in a single select, using this facility radically reduces the amount of network traffic associated with SELECT operations and typically results in savings of up to 90% in elapsed time. The Array Fetch page in the Top SQL drilldown displays information on array processing for the Oracle database under investigation, including array utilization, call/trip rates, and details of the SQL statements that use array processing.
• Calibrated Sequential Read Time diagnostics - Alarm raised when the average time that Oracle takes to read a single block of data — typically an index-based lookup — is significantly higher than the average time recorded during calibration.

• Alert Log page  - In the Configuration & Memory drilldown for Spotlight on Oracle, this page displays a chronological list of messages and errors that have occurred for the Oracle database under investigation (Oracle 9.2.0.4 and later).
• Predictive Diagnostics - Spotlight can now predict the future performance for individual SQL statements on the database under investigation. These predictions can be used to identify SQL statements whose performance may not scale adequately as data volumes and SQL execution rates increase (Oracle 9.2.0.4 and later).
• Spotlight on UNIX, Linux and Windows - Spotlight on Oracle is bundled with these operating-system (O/S) Spotlights in order to perform diagnostics on the underlying O/S.

New Features in Spotlight on Oracle Xpert Edition v5.0

In addition to the features available in the Standard and Professional Editions, Spotlight on Oracle Xpert also contains these new features:

• Top SQL drilldown for Oracle RAC - The information in this drilldown is now available for the Oracle RAC cluster as a whole.
• Services diagnostics - The Services drilldown within Spotlight on Oracle RAC displays details of the services defined and deployed for the Oracle RAC cluster under investigation (Oracle 10.2 and later).
• SQL Optimization - Quest's SQL Optimizer software comes bundled in providing the ability to tune SQL statements to improve performance.