Chances are that if you’re into workload management at all, your using at least one throttle. Maybe you are using more. On the other hand, maybe you’re just thinking about it. Object Throttles (as opposed to Workload Throttles) allow you stray from the straight and narrow, because they offer you an array of options and can be used creative combinations. This makes it possible for you to get in over your head when your throttles overlap or conflict. If you are not able to keep your throttles simple, this article is intended to preview what are getting yourself into.

Michael McIntire’s recent posting on NoPI tables (read it now!) got me thinking more and more about mini-batch, and how it’s growing in popularity. Mini-batch is a technique that lets you update database tables in small batches several, many times a day using batch approaches. This could be a little batch job every hour, or it could be every 5 minutes, whatever frequency you choose.

The question of what Estimated Processing Time actually is comes up a lot. For example, the DBQLogTbl table carries an “EstProcTime” Value. If you are EXPLAIN-savy, then you’ve bumped up against “Estimated Time” numbers in almost every step of every query plan you’ve ever looked at. You TASM users frequently rely on “Estimated Processing Time” as a classification criteria to manage the priority that a query will enjoy. Some think Estimated Processing Time is an estimate of clock seconds, and others believe it represents CPU seconds.