Slow SQL Help
Slow SQL queries can be one of the most frustrating and performance degrading aspects of database administration. What makes it particularly frustrating is if you have developers on your production box. :-)

Bad queries manage to find their way into every database. Karma provides a method to be a little more proactive about monitoring this activity, and letting you know hopefully before they become a problem. Karma, though, can only help identify those queries that are problems, it can't optimize them.

Optimizing queries can mean anything from analyzing related tables and indexes in a schema, providing hints to suggest a better execution plan, creating indexes to provide Oracle with a faster way to the data, or actually rearranging the query so that perhaps it enables an index that it previously disabled. For more information on all aspects of SQL query tuning see Guy Harrison's book "Oracle SQL High Performance Tuning" - ISBN 0136142311.

Here's a configuration example:

slowsql:15:100:200

In this example we're monitoring every 15 minutes. We're deciding that queries that do more than 100 data block I/Os flags a WARNING, and 200 I/Os flags an ALERT. Adjust this to suit the needs of your particular database, and the speed of your disks. On an RAID array for example, you might be able to multiply these numbers by 5 and still see good performance.

Please test this before running it on your production database and limit how often you run it, as it can be a "slow sql" query.