Carlos Sierra's Tools and Tips

Quite often I learn of a system where “nobody changed anything” and suddenly the system is experiencing some strange behavior. Then after diligent investigation it turns out someone changed a little parameter at the System level, but somehow disregarded mentioning it since he/she thought it had no connection to the unexpected behavior.  As we all know, System parameters are big knobs that we don’t change lightly, still we often see “unknown” changes like the one described.

Script below produces a list of changes to System parameter values, indicating when a parameter was changed and from which value into which value. It does not filter out cache re-sizing operations, or resource manager plan changes. Both would be easy to exclude, but I’d rather see those global changes listed as well.

Note: This script below should only be executed if your site has a license for the Oracle Diagnostics pack (or Tuning pack), since it reads from AWR.

WITH
all_parameters AS (
SELECT snap_id,
       dbid,
       instance_number,
       parameter_name,
       value,
       isdefault,
       ismodified,
       lag(value) OVER (PARTITION BY dbid, instance_number, parameter_hash ORDER BY snap_id) prior_value
  FROM dba_hist_parameter
)
SELECT TO_CHAR(s.begin_interval_time, 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI') begin_time,
       TO_CHAR(s.end_interval_time, 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI') end_time,
       p.snap_id,
       p.dbid,
       p.instance_number,
       p.parameter_name,
       p.value,
       p.isdefault,
       p.ismodified,
       p.prior_value
  FROM all_parameters p,
       dba_hist_snapshot s
 WHERE p.value != p.prior_value
   AND s.snap_id = p.snap_id
   AND s.dbid = p.dbid
   AND s.instance_number = p.instance_number
 ORDER BY
       s.begin_interval_time DESC,
       p.dbid,
       p.instance_number,
       p.parameter_name
/

Sample output follows, where we can see a parameter affecting Degree of Parallelism was changed. This is just to illustrate its use. Enjoy this new free script! It is now part of edb360.