EXPLAIN PLAN shared memory

Recently I did an investigation of an ORA-04031 which happens almost regularly on a 10.2.0.4 Oracle database server with 9G of memory allocated to shared pool and disabled Automatic Shared Memory Management (sga_target=0). The problem query is a report that is a very big SQL query – more than 200K of plain text. The exact error message is “ORA-04031: unable to allocate 235704 bytes of shared memory (“shared pool”,”select * from (…”,”Typecheck”,”qry_text : qcpisqt”)”. Here I’ll briefly describe what I did to identify root cause of the error and will talk about one interesting detail of the EXPLAIN PLAN as it was used to reproduce the issue.

Automatic shared memory resize with disabled ASMM/AMM

Thanks to Nigel Antell – he has posted a comment on one of Tanel Poder’s blog notes with a link to MOS Doc ID 1269139.1. In this note a parameter called _MEMORY_IMM_MODE_WITHOUT_AUTOSGA is described. It allows Oracle 11gR2 to adjust sizes of shared memory structures even if Automatic (Shared) Memory Management have been explicitly disabled; with the main purpose of avoiding ORA-04031 error. This is nice.
PS. I wonder if it was done by Oracle development specifically due to many customers don’t like ASMM (for ex. because of negative impact on application) but encounter ORA-04031 from time to time, which results in many opened SRs. Who knows.