Automatic Indexing in 19c

One of the most impressive new features of Oracle Database 19c is Automatic Indexing. Arguably, this is the most interesting innovation in the database world for a rather long time.

I remember some years ago when a DBA asked me at an Oracle conference: “Julian, why are half of the presentations at Oracle database conferences only about performance tuning? Is the Oracle database performing that badly that people should tune it all the time?” Sigh…

With 19c and ADB (Oracle Autonomous Database), things look very different now, don’t they? Automatic Indexing provides what database systems need: continuous optimization of the database workload, stable & solid performance and almost no human interaction. Let me share some of my early experience with Automatic Indexing and where human interaction is needed.

For now (February 18th, 2019), Oracle 19c is only available on Exadata (Linux 7.4) and in order to enable Automatic Indexing you need to do the following:

EXEC DBMS_AUTO_INDEX.CONFIGURE('AUTO_INDEX_MODE','IMPLEMENT');

As you can guess from the picture above, the so called expert system of Automatic Indexing runs every 15th minute for as long as one hour. Note that I disabled the job from 4:43 till 5:56. The Resource Manager plan limits the task to 1 CPU only and the next run is skipped if the job has not been completed within the 15 minutes.

Here are details on how Automatic Indexing works but what is most important to remember is as follows:

– The auto index candidates are created as invisible auto indexes
– If the performance of SQL statements is not improved from the auto indexes, then the indexes are marked as unusable and the corresponding SQL statements are blacklisted
– Auto indexes cannot be used for any first time SQL run against the database
– Auto indexes are created as either single, concatenated indexes or function-based indexes and they all use advanced low compression
– The unused auto indexes are deleted after 373 days (can be changed)
– The unused non-auto indexes (manual indexes) are never deleted by the automatic indexing process but can be deleted automatically if needed

The Auto Indexing can be disabled at any time or can be set to set to reporting mode (new auto indexes as created asinvisible indexes, so that they cannot be used in SQL) with the following commands:

EXEC DBMS_AUTO_INDEX.CONFIGURE('AUTO_INDEX_MODE','OFF');

 

EXEC DBMS_AUTO_INDEX.CONFIGURE('AUTO_INDEX_MODE','REPORT ONLY');

Here is a way to ask Oracle to create new auto indexes in a separate tablespace called AUTO_INDEX_TS:

SQL> EXEC DBMS_AUTO_INDEX.CONFIGURE('AUTO_INDEX_DEFAULT_TABLESPACE','AUTO_INDEX_TS');

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Elapsed: 00:00:00.01

You can easily check the configuration for Automatic Indexing for the root container and the PDBs from CDB_AUTO_INDEX_CONFIG;

If you need a report of what happened during the expert system activity (either last 3 days or during the last activity), here is a way to generate it:

set long 300000
select DBMS_AUTO_INDEX.REPORT_ACTIVITY(SYSTIMESTAMP-3,SYSTIMESTAMP,'TEXT','ALL','ALL') from dual;
select DBMS_AUTO_INDEX.REPORT_LAST_ACTIVITY('TEXT','ALL','ALL') from dual;

These are the most important views about Auto Indexing:

DBA_AUTO_INDEX_EXECUTIONS: history of execution of automatic indexing tasks
DBA_AUTO_INDEX_STATISTICS: statistics related to auto indexes
DBA_AUTO_INDEX_IND_ACTIONS: actions performed on auto indexes
DBA_AUTO_INDEX_SQL_ACTIONS: actions performed on SQL statements for verifying auto indexes
DBA_AUTO_INDEX_CONFIG: configuration settings related to auto indexes
DBA_AUTO_INDEX_VERIFICATIONS: stats about PLAN_HASH_VALUE, AUTO_INDEX_BUFFER_GETS, etc.

The new package DBMS_AUTO_INDEX can be used for 3 main things:

1. Configuration of the parameters related to Auto Indexing
2. Drop *all* the indexes except the ones used for constraints
3. Report the activity of the “expert system”:

Finally, here are some additional resources:

– Automatic Indexing in Oracle Database 19c
– Oracle Database 19c is now available!
– Managing Auto Indexes

How to check if I have any auto indexes in my database: select auto, count(*) from dba_indexes group by auto;