SQLd360 v1617 finally includes a new “Observations” section (section 1F) that I pushed back for long, very long 🙂

If you are not familiar with SQLTXPLAIN then consider the reports in this section like “yellow flags”, specific items that are not necessarily causing direct troubles to your SQL but are still questionable and need further investigation / verification / blessing for such item to be kept in place.

There are many reasons why I pushed back for a long time, first one being the results can be easily misleading and make you believe the underlying cause is A while maybe it’s Z. Another reason is most of the observations ended up just being informative with no action taken against them, still you had to scroll hundreds of them.
Because of what just said, combined with the need to keep the checks “useful”, the current list of observations is intentionally short (and incomplete as of now), it includes only observations for:

• Some system-wide settings, e.g. CBO parameters, OFE version, etc
• Few plan and cursor-specific information, e.g. index referenced in some plan is now missing
• Table statistics, e.g. partition that are empty according to stats

The list won’t grow much based on my ideas for the same reason it’s short now, I don’t want to implement checks I believe are important when 99% of the people don’t care about them.

That’s why this blog post, I need your feedback and ideas to implement what you care about 🙂
Let me know what you would like to have in the observation section and I’ll work on it!
Just keep in mind the goal is to keep that section relatively fast so super-complex checks that take 10 mins to execute are off the list.

Note: v1617 also turns off a couple of less-used features like TCB and AWR reports by default (can easily be enabled back via config file) so don’t be surprised if they don’t show up in column 5.