Ora-lytics

AUTO_PARTITION – Inspecting & Implementing Recommendations

Posted on October 17, 2022 Updated on October 7, 2022

In a previous blog post I gave an overview of the DBMS_AUTO_PARTITION package in Oracle Autonomous Database. This looked at how you can get started and to setup Auto Partitioning and to allow it to automatically implement partitioning.

This might not be something the DBAs will want to happen for lots of different reasons. An alternative is to use DBMS_AUTO_PARTITION to make recommendations for tables where partitioning will have a performance improvement. The DBA can inspect these recommendations and decide which of these to implement.

In the previous post we set the CONFIGURE function to be ‘IMPLEMENT’. We need to change that to report the recommendations.

exec dbms_auto_partition.configure('AUTO_PARTITION_MODE','REPORT ONLY');

Just remember, tables will only be considered by AUTO_PARTITION as outlined in my previous post.

Next we can ask for recommendations using the RECOMMEND_PARTITION_METHOD function.

exec  dbms_auto_partition.recommend_partition_method(
   table_owner => 'WHISKEY',
   table_name => 'DIRECTIONS',
   report_type => 'TEXT',
   report_section => 'ALL',
   report_level => 'ALL');

The results from this are stored in DBA_AUTO_PARTITION_RECOMMENDATIONS, which you can query to view the recommendations.

select recommendation_id, partition_method, partition_key
from dba_auto_partition_recommendations;

RECOMMENDATION_ID                PARTITION_METHOD                                                                                                        PARTITION_KEY
-------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------
D28FC3CF09DF1E1DE053D010000ABEA6 Method: LIST(SYS_OP_INTERVAL_HIGH_BOUND("D", INTERVAL '2' MONTH, TIMESTAMP '2019-08-10 00:00:00')) AUTOMATIC  D

To apply the recommendation pass the RECOMMENDATION_KEY value to the APPLY_RECOMMENDATION function.

exec dbms_auto_partition.apply_recommendation('D28FC3CF09DF1E1DE053D010000ABEA6');

It might takes some minutes for the partitioned table to become available. During this time the original table will remain available as the change will be implemented using a ALTER TABLE MODIFY PARTITION ONLINE command.

Two other functions include REPORT_ACTIVITY and REPORT_LAST_ACTIVITY. These can be used to export a detailed report on the recommendations in text or HTML form. It is probably a good idea to create and download these for your change records.

spool autoPartitionFinding.html
select dbms_auto_partition.report_last_activity(type=>'HTML') from dual;
exit;