Viewing Figures

Once again the view counter has reached a vaguely significant number – some time overnight the figure crept past 3,500,000. So it’s time to have a little review to see what’s been popular and how things have changed in the 10 months it took to accumulate 500,000 views. Sitting in the lounge at Edinburgh airport I’ve now transcribed some of the WordPress stats.

All time ratings

AWR / Statspack	69,599	Updated from time to time
NOT IN	46,668	February 2007
Cartesian Merge Join	36,456	December 2006
dbms_xplan in 10g	36,020	November 2006
Analysing Statspack (1)	27,879	November 2006

Ratings over the last year

AWR / Statspack	14,638	Updated from time to time
AWR Reports	9,937	February 2011
Shrink Tablespace	8,423	February 2010
NOT IN	7,125	February 2007
Lock Modes	6,025	June 2010

The figures for the previous half million views (opens in a new window) are roughly similar for most of the top 5, although last year had a big spike for the “Oracle Core” page which has had only 4,781 views this year, and there’s a marked drop in the popularity of the “AWR/Statspack” menu.

The number of followers has gone up from about 1,200 to about 2,500 in that time, but I suspect that about 1,000 of the difference is due to twitter and double-counting.

Viewing Figures

It’s time for another landmark. The blog hit 3,000,000 views on 30th November  - but I’ve been too busy to do my usual analysis of posts. The latest half million took 42 weeks (five weeks less than the previous half million increment) and here are the latest stats on popular views:

First the top five across the lifetime of the blog (excluding the home page and opening menu) and the old faviourites haven’t changed:

AWR / Statspack menu	57,477	Updated from time to time
NOT IN	40.952	Feb 2007
Cartesian Merge Join	33,367	Dec 2006
dbms_xplan in 10g	33,279	Dec 2006
SQL Profiles (10g)	25,219	Feb 2007

If we look at just the last year, the top five are:

AWR / Statspack menu	19.307	Updated from time to time
Oracle Core	9.996	Dec 2011
Shrink Tablespace	8,788	Feb 2010
AWR Reports	8,548	Feb 2011
NOT IN	8,026	Feb 2007

A couple of old favourites (dbms_xplan in 10g and SQL Profiles (10g) have finally fallen off the top slots, and Cartesian Merge Join didn’t make it back after slipping last year – but it’s interesting (and not entirely surprising) to see how NOT IN is still coming up after so many years.

The other statistic of note is the number of followers the blog has, currently 1,197 (although it was 1,185 on 30th Nov – I probably picked up a few more immediately after the UKOUG annual conference).

 

Viewing Figures

It’s time for another landmark. The blog has just hit 2,500,000 views (taking three weeks less than the previous half million increment) – here’s a little breakdown on the numbers.

First the top five across the lifetime of the blog:

AWR / Statspack menu	40,714	Updated from time to time
NOT IN	33,983	Feb 2007
Cartesian Merge Join	29,633	Dec 2006
dbms_xplan in 10g	28,831	Dec 2006
SQL Profiles (10g)	21,227	Feb 2007

If we look at just the last year, the top five are:

AWR / Statspack menu	18,782	Updated from time to time
NOT IN	8,916	Feb 2007
dbms_xplan in 10g	6,212	Dec 2006
Oracle Core	6,181	Dec 2011
Analysing Statspack (1)	5,924	Nov 2006

The Cartesian Merge Join has finally been pushed off the top 5 in recent history, but perhaps that’s only a temporary effect while the Addenda to Oracle Core is still fresh in people’s minds. It’s interesting to see how many old articles are still popular reading, though.

The other statistic of note is the number of followers the blog has, currently: 828

Anniversary

I missed my fifth blogging anniversary by a month – my first post was dated 24th Oct 2006 on the topic of the parameter optimizer_index_cost_adj.

Since then I’ve posted about 670 articles (and deleted a few temporary ones) and drafted another 110; I’ve acquired 750 followers;  and the blog has inspired a little  over 6,000 comments. It’s amazing how time passes and the numbers accumulate.

To celebrate the event I’ve created a new category (see top right) of “Site History” so that I could label that first post and the various posts I’ve made about viewing figures and popular posts.

Visitors etc.

Well, I’ve finally reached another “landmark” number in the page views – 2,000,000 views (after four and a half years) – so it’s time for a little statistical summary for comparison with the last landmark.

Looking at just the results for the last 12 months, here are some numbers in different categories.

Viewing Figures

Although I wasn’t convinced by the 25,000,000 view figures I reported (temporarily) last week, I’m inclined to trust my page view counter which is currently showing a little of 1,500,000 page views; and, as I have in the past, I thought I would produce a summary of what’s been of most interest to visitors:

If we look at the complete lifetime of the blog, the top five are:

Cartesian Merge Join	19,894
NOT IN	18,493
dbms_xplan in 10g	17,324
Bind Variables	13,773
Statspack Examples	13,076

But restricting the figures to just the last year this changes to:

NOT IN	7,976
dbms_xplan in 10g	6,799
Statspack Examples	6,576
SQL Profiles (10g)	5,376
Cartesian Merge Join	4,992

Perhaps the drop in popularity of the item on Cartesian Merge Joins is an indication that people are getting over the belief that it is automatically a bad thing – which is particularly important given the way that you are more likely to see them appearing in 10g than you used to in earlier versions of Oracle.  (But maybe it’s an indication of a take-up of 11g, where the optimiser has changed yet again.)

Summary Stats

As I write this post my page view counter has just clicked past the “magic million” marker – so I thought it was time to update the previous summary of what’s been of most interest to visitors:

If we look at the complete lifetime of the blog, the top five are:

Cartesian Merge Join	14,982
Bind Variables	11,474
dbms_xplan in 10g	10,719
NOT IN	10,661
Index Rebuild 10g	8,811

But restricting view to just the last year this changes a little to:

NOT IN	7,351
Index Rebuild 10g	6,636
Cartesian Merge Join	6,626
dbms_xplan in 10g	5,959
SQL Profiles (10g)	5,010

Of course – while 1,000,000 sounds like quite nice landmark figure to me – I can always put things into perspective by remembering that one of my clients had already reached a rate of 1,000,000 page hits in five minutes several years ago; and then there’s a video on youtube.com of Susan Boyle performing for “Britain’s Got Talent” that clocked up more than 42 million views in less than a week.

Page hits

Another landmark – this morning the blog counter reached 750,000. It’s taken a little longer to get the third 250,000 than it did the second – but given how little I’ve written over the last few months it’s still a pleasant surprise.

WordPress supples some interesting stats, so I’ve copied up the top three entries for populare posts. [Edited: I did have an icon to the right that I though would let you see the stats for the post - but you have to log in as me to see them. The point of putting the icon there was to show that these searches show a fairly uniform pattern of arrival, rather than occasional peaks]

Cartesian Merge Join	10,718
Bind Variables	8,660
dbms_xplan in 10g	6,562

There’s also a section in the statistics about search times – unsurprisingly searches for my name, or the blog name feature quite highly, but the three commonest search terms are quite interesting:

ora-01722	1,418
oracle not in	1,231
merge join cartesian	1,162

All three of these look like search terms that are likely to have come from end-users who have been surprised by changes in execution plans after an upgrade to 10g.

Targets

Two achievements recorded today:

Some time early this morning (GMT) the blog reach 500,000 visits.  Not too bad for about 14 months – but still running at less than half the rate of the website.

Most popular page, with 6,100 views, is : Cartesian Merge Join pushing July’s Bind Variables posting with 5,900 views into second place in the popular posts rankings.

The other item – an email, also arriving very early in the morning – was the news from Apress that they are preparing another print-run of Cost Based Oracle – Fundamentals. (The email said it was the third run – but so did the email they sent around this time last year so I’m going to call it the fourth print run).

Popular Posts

Yesterday evening my page view count reached 250,000 according to Statcounter. (According to Wordpress it got there about 3 weeks ago – and if you include their figures for page views through feeds the figure goes up by about 50% .)

In recognition of the landmark, I did a quick trawl back in time to see which were the most popular pages; the two I picked up last time are still there, with a more recent page that overtook them soon after it was published.

In third place, published on 15th Dec 2006, with  2,570 hits: an explanation of why 10g (in particular) could leave statements crashing with Oracle error ORA-01722 when they used to run perfectly well on earlier versions of Oracle.

In second place, published on 13th Dec 2006, with 2,690 hits: my notes on why you might be seeing a lot more Cartesian Merge Joins than you used to in earlier versions.

In first place, published on 5th Jan 2007, with 2,916 hits: an article about bind variables - with some useful feedback from readers.

Optimizer_index_cost_adj

[Updated 28th November 2011] – just after the fifth anniversary – to mark this as the first post of the Oracle Scratchpad.

A recent post on one of the OTN Database General forum pages asked about the effect of having the parameter optimizer_index_cost_adj set when you enable system statistics (also known as CPU costing).