Additional Considerations for Parallel DML

If a parallel restriction is violated, the operation is simply performed serially. If a direct-path INSERT restriction is violated, then the APPEND hint is ignored and a conventional insert operation is performed. No error message is returned.

For tables that do not have the parallel DML itl invariant property (tables created before Oracle9i Release 2 (9.2) or tables that were created with the COMPATIBLE initialization parameter set to less than 9.2), the degree of parallelism (DOP) equals the number of partitions or subpartitions. That means that, if the table is not partitioned, the query runs serially. To see what tables do not have this property, issue the following statement:

SELECT u.name, o.name FROM obj$ o, tab$ t, user$ u
WHERE o.obj# = t.obj# AND o.owner# = u.user#
 AND bitand(t.property,536870912) != 536870912;

For information about the interested transaction list (ITL), also called the transaction table, refer to Oracle Database Concepts.

If you have global indexes, a global index segment and global index blocks are shared by server processes of the same parallel DML statement. Even if the operations are not performed against the same row, the server processes can share the same index blocks. Each server transaction needs one transaction entry in the index block header before it can make changes to a block. Therefore, in the CREATE INDEX or ALTER INDEX statements, you should set INITRANS, the initial number of transactions allocated within each data block, to a large value, such as the maximum DOP against this index.

There is a limitation on the available number of transaction free lists for segments in dictionary-managed tablespaces. After a segment has been created, the number of process and transaction free lists is fixed and cannot be altered. If you specify a large number of process free lists in the segment header, you might find that this limits the number of transaction free lists that are available. You can abate this limitation the next time you re-create the segment header by decreasing the number of process free lists; this leaves more room for transaction free lists in the segment header.

For UPDATE and DELETE operations, each server process can require its own transaction free list. The parallel DML DOP is thus effectively limited by the smallest number of transaction free lists available on the table and on any of the global indexes the DML statement must maintain. For example, if the table has 25 transaction free lists and the table has two global indexes, one with 50 transaction free lists and one with 30 transaction free lists, the DOP is limited to 25. If the table had 40 transaction free lists, the DOP would have been limited to 30.

The FREELISTS parameter of the STORAGE clause is used to set the number of process free lists. By default, no process free lists are created.

The default number of transaction free lists depends on the block size. For example, if the number of process free lists is not set explicitly, a 4 KB block has about 80 transaction free lists by default. The minimum number of transaction free lists is 25.

Parallel DDL and parallel DML operations can generate a large number of redo logs. A single ARCH process to archive these redo logs might not be able to keep up. To avoid this problem, you can spawn multiple archiver processes manually or by using a job queue.

Parallel DML operations use a large number of data, index, and undo blocks in the buffer cache during a short interval. For example, suppose you see a high number of free_buffer_waits after querying the V$SYSTEM_EVENT view, as in the following syntax:

SELECT TOTAL_WAITS FROM V$SYSTEM_EVENT WHERE EVENT = 'FREE BUFFER WAITS';

In this case, you should consider increasing the DBWn processes. If there are no waits for free buffers, the query does not return any rows.