Rows per block

A recent question on the OTN database forum:

Can any one please point to me a document or a way to calculate the average number of rows per block in oralce 10.2.0.3

One answer would be to collect stats and then approximate as block / avg_row_len – although you have to worry about things like row overheads, the row directory, and block overheads before you can be sure you’ve got it right. On top of this, the average might not be too helpful anyway. So here’s another (not necessarily fast) option that gives you more information about the blocks that have any rows in them (I picked the source$ table from a 10g system because source$ is often good for some extreme behaviour).

break on report

compute sum of tot_blocks on report
compute sum of tot_rows   on report

column avg_rows format 999.99

select
	twentieth,
	min(rows_per_block)			min_rows,
	max(rows_per_block)			max_rows,
	sum(block_ct)				tot_blocks,
	sum(row_total)				tot_rows,
	round(sum(row_total)/sum(block_ct),2)	avg_rows
from
	(
	select
		ntile(20) over (order by rows_per_block) twentieth,
		rows_per_block,
		count(*)			block_ct,
		rows_per_block * count(*)	row_total
	from
		(
		select
			fno, bno, count(*) rows_per_block
		from
			(
			select
				dbms_rowid.rowid_relative_fno(rowid)	as fno,
				dbms_rOwId.rowid_block_number(rowid)	as bno
			from
				source$
			)
		group by
			fno, bno
		)
	group by
		rows_per_block
	order by
		rows_per_block
	)
group by
	twentieth
order by
	twentieth
;

I’ve used the ntile() function to split the results into 20 lines, obviously you might want to change this according to the expected variation in rowcounts for your target table. In my case the results looked like this:

 TWENTIETH   MIN_ROWS   MAX_ROWS TOT_BLOCKS   TOT_ROWS AVG_ROWS
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- --------
         1          1         11       2706       3470     1.28
         2         12         22         31        492    15.87
         3         23         34         30        868    28.93
         4         35         45         20        813    40.65
         5         46         57         13        664    51.08
         6         59         70         18       1144    63.56
         7         71         81         23       1751    76.13
         8         82         91         47       4095    87.13
         9         92        101         79       7737    97.94
        10        102        111        140      14976   106.97
        11        112        121        281      32799   116.72
        12        122        131        326      41184   126.33
        13        132        141        384      52370   136.38
        14        142        151        325      47479   146.09
        15        152        161        225      35125   156.11
        16        162        171        110      18260   166.00
        17        172        181         58      10207   175.98
        18        182        191         18       3352   186.22
        19        193        205         22       4377   198.95
        20        206        222         16       3375   210.94
                                 ---------- ----------
sum                                    4872     284538

Of course, the moment you see a result like this it prompts you to ask more questions.

Is the “bell curve” effect that you can see centred around the 13th ntile indicative of a normal distribution of row lengths – if so why is the first ntile such an extreme outlier – is that indicative of a number of peculiarly long rows, did time of arrival have a special effect, is it the result of a particular pattern of delete activity … and so on.

Averages are generally very bad indicators if you’re worried about the behaviour of an Oracle system.