Small Tables

Here’s a note I’ve been meaning to research and write up for more than 18 months – ever since Dion Cho pinged a note I’d written about the effects of partitioning because of a comment it made about the “2% small table threshold”.

It has long been an item of common knowledge that Oracle has a “small table threshold” that allows for special treatment of data segments that are smaller than two percent of the size of the buffer cache, viz:

If a table is longer than the threshold then a full tablescan of the table will only use db_file_multiblock_read_count buffers at the end of the LRU (least recently used) chain to read the table and (allowing a little inaccuracy for multi-user systems, pinning and so on) keeps recycling the same few buffers to read the table thus protecting the bulk of the buffer cache from being wiped out by a single large tablescan. Such a tablescan would be recorded under the statistic “table scans (long tables)”.

If a table is shorter than the threshold then it is read to the midpoint of the cache (just like any other block read) but – whether by accident or design – the touch count (x$bh.tch) is not set and the table will fall off the LRU end of the buffer cache fairly promptly as other objects are read into the buffer. Such a tablescan would be recorded under the statistic “table scans (short tables)”.

Then, in July 2009, Dion Cho decided to check this description before repeating it, and set about testing it on Oracle 10gR2 – producing some surprising results and adding another item to my to-do list. Since then I have wanted to check his conclusions, check whether the original description had ever been true and when (or if) it had changed.

As a simple starting point, of course, it was easy to check the description of the relevant (hidden) parameter to see when it changed:

8.1.7.4     _small_table_threshold        threshold level of table size for forget-bit enabled during scan
9.2.0.4     _small_table_threshold        threshold level of table size for direct reads  
11.2.0.1    _small_table_threshold        lower threshold level of table size for direct reads

This suggests that the behaviour might have changed some time in 9i (9.2.0.4 happened to be the earliest 9i listing of x$ksppi I had on file) – so I clearly had at least three major versions to check.

The behaviour of the cache isn’t an easy thing to test, though, because there are a number of special cases to consider – in particular the results could be affected by the positioning of the “mid-point” marker (x$kcbwds.cold_hd) that separates the “cold” buffers from the “hot” buffers. By default the hot portion of the default buffer is 50% of the total cache (set by hidden parameter _db_percent_hot_default) but on instance startup or after a “flush buffer cache” there are no used buffers so the behaviour can show some anomalies.

So here’s the basic strategy:

Start the instance
Create a number of relatively small tables with no indexes
Create a table large enough to come close to filling the cache, with an index to allow indexed access
Collect stats on the table – largest last.
Query the large table through an index range scan to fill the cache
Repeat a couple of times with at least 3 second pauses to allow for incrementing the touch count
Check x$bh for buffer usage
Run repeated tablescans for the smaller tables to see how many blocks end up in the cache at different sizes.

Here’s some sample code:

create table t_15400
pctfree 99
pctused 1
as
with generator as (
	select	--+ materialize
		rownum id 
	from dual 
	connect by 
		rownum <= 10000
)
select
	rownum			id,
	lpad(rownum,10,'0')	small_vc,
	rpad('x',100)		padding
from
	generator	v1,
	generator	v2
where
	rownum <= 15400
;

create index t_15400_id on t_15400(id);

begin
	dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(
		ownname		 => user,
		tabname		 =>'T_15400',
		estimate_percent => 100,
		method_opt 	 => 'for all columns size 1'
	);
end;
/

select
	object_name, object_id, data_object_id
from
	user_objects
where
	object_name in  (
		'T_300',
		'T_770',
		'T_1540',
		'T_3750',
		'T_7700',
		'T_15400',
		'T_15400_ID'
	)
order by
	object_id
;

select
	/*+ index(t) */
	max(small_vc)
from
	t_15400 t
where
	id > 0
;

The extract shows the creation of just the last and largest table I created and collected statistics for – and it was the only one with an index. I chose the number of blocks (I’ve rigged one row per block) because I had set up a db_cache_size of 128MB on my 10.2.0.3 Oracle instance and this had given me 15,460 buffers.

As you can see from the query against user_objects my test case included tables with 7,700 rows (50%), 3,750 rows (25%), 1,540 rows (10%), 770 rows (5%) and 300 rows (2%). (The number in brackets are the approximate sizes of the tables – all slightly undersized – relative to the number of buffers in the default cache).

Here’s the query that I then ran against x$bh (connected as sys from another session) to see what was in the cache (the range of values needs to be adjusted to cover the range of object_id reported from user_objects):

select 
	obj, tch, count(*)
from	x$bh
where 
	obj between 77710 and 77720
group by 
	obj, tch
order by 
	count(*)
;

Typical results from 10.2.0.3

After executing the first index range scan of t_15400 to fill the cache three times:

       OBJ        TCH   COUNT(*)
---------- ---------- ----------
     75855          0          1
     75854          0          1
     75853          0          1
     75851          0          1
     75850          0          1
     75849          0          1
     75852          0          1
     75855          2          9    -- Index blocks, touch count incremented
     75855          1         18    -- Index blocks, touch count incremented
     75854          1      11521    -- Table blocks, touch count incremented

Then after three tablescans, at 4 second intervals, of the 7,700 block table:

       OBJ        TCH   COUNT(*)
---------- ---------- ----------
     75853          3          1    -- segment header of 7700 table, touch count incremented each time
     75855          0          1
     75854          0          1
     75852          0          1
     75849          0          1
     75850          0          1
     75851          0          1
     75855          2          9
     75855          1         10
     75853          0       3991    -- lots of blocks from 7700 table, no touch count increment
     75854          1       7538

Then repeating the tablescan of the 3,750 block table three times:

       OBJ        TCH   COUNT(*)
---------- ---------- ----------
     75853          3          1
     75855          0          1
     75854          0          1
     75851          0          1
     75852          3          1    -- segment header block, touch count incremented each time
     75849          0          1
     75850          0          1
     75855          2          9
     75855          1         10
     75853          0        240
     75852          0       3750    -- table completely cached - touch count not incremented
     75854          1       7538

Then repeating the tablescan of the 1,540 block table three times:

       OBJ        TCH   COUNT(*)
---------- ---------- ----------
     75853          3          1
     75855          0          1
     75854          0          1
     75851          3          1    -- segment header block, touch count incremented each time
     75849          0          1
     75850          0          1
     75852          3          1
     75855          2          9
     75855          1         10
     75853          0        149
     75851          2       1540    -- Table fully cached, touch count incremented but only to 2
     75852          0       2430
     75854          1       7538

Then executing the tablescan of the 770 block table three times:

       OBJ        TCH   COUNT(*)
---------- ---------- ----------
     75853          3          1
     75855          0          1
     75850          3          1    -- segment header block, touch count incremented each time
     75849          0          1
     75851          3          1
     75852          3          1
     75854          0          1
     75855          2          9
     75855          1         10
     75851          0         69
     75853          0        149
     75850          2        770    -- Table fully cached, touch count incremented but only to 2
     75851          2       1471
     75852          0       1642
     75854          1       7538

Finally executing the tablescan of the 300 block table three times:

       OBJ        TCH   COUNT(*)
---------- ---------- ----------
     75853          3          1
     75855          0          1
     75854          0          1
     75850          3          1
     75852          3          1
     75851          3          1
     75855          2          9
     75855          1         10
     75851          0         69
     75850          0        131
     75853          0        149
     75849          3        301	-- Table, and segment header, cached and touch count incremented 3 times
     75850          2        639
     75852          0       1342
     75851          2       1471
     75854          1       7538

This set of results on its own isn’t conclusive, of course, but the indications for 10.2.0.3 are:

a) “Large” tablescans don’t increment the touch count – so avoiding promotion to the hot portion of the buffer
b) There is a 25% boundary (ca. 3750 in this case) above which a tablescan will start to recycle the buffer it has used
c) There is a 10% boundary (ca. 1540 in this case) below which repeating a scan WILL increment the touch count
d) There is a 2% boundary (ca. 300 in this case) below which tablescans will always increment the touch count.

I can’t state with any certainty where the used and recycled buffers might be, but since blocks from the 3750 tablescan removed the blocks from the 7700 tablescan, it’s possible that “large” tablescans do somehow go “to the bottom quarter” of the LRU.

There also some benefit in checking the statistics “table scans (short)” and “table scans (long)” as the tests run. For the 2% (300 block) table I recorded 3 short tablescans; for the tables in the 2% to 10% range (770 and 1540) I recorded one long and two short (which is consistent with the touch count increment of 2 – the first scan was expected to be long, but the 2nd and 3rd were deemed to be short based on some internal algorithm about the tables being fully cached); finally for the tables above 10% we always got 3 long tablescans.

But as it says in the original note on small partitions – there are plenty of questions still to answer:

I’ve cited 2%, 10%, and 25% and only one of these is set by a parameter (_small_table_threshold is derived as 2% of the db_cache_size – in simple cases) are the other figures derived, settable, or hard-coded.

I’ve quoted the 2% as the fraction of the db_cache_size – but we have automatic SGA management in 10g, automatic memory management in 11g, and up to eight different cache sizing parameters in every version from 9i onwards. What figure is used as the basis for the 2%, and is that 2% of the blocks or 2% of the bytes, and if you have multiple block sizes does each cache perhaps allow 2% of its own size.

And then, in 11g we have to worry about automatic direct path serial tablescans – and it would be easy to think that the “_small_table_threshold” may have been describing that feature since (at least) 9.2.0.4 if its description hadn’t changed slightly for 11.2 !

So much to do, so little time — but at least you know that there’s something that needs careful investigation if you’re planning to do lots of tablescans.

Footnote: Having written some tests, it’s easy to change versions. Running on 8.1.7.4 and 9.2.0.8, with similar sized caches, I could see that the “traditional” description of the “small_table_threshold” was true – a short tablescan was anything less 2% of the buffer cache, long tablescans were (in effect) done using just a window of “db_file_multiblock_read_count” buffers, and in both cases the touch count was never set (except for the segment header block).