AWR Usage Poll

A number of recent threads in the Oracle-L list have made it pretty clear that Automated Workload Repository (AWR) is a tool that you are expected to use when troubleshooting a database problem.

Never mind the fact that AWR is still a product that is licensed separately from the database, and that a large segment of the Oracle DBA population doesn't seem to realize that. Or that Active Session History (ASH) is part of AWR, and falls under the same license restrictions.

So I conducted a poll regarding the use of AWR. AWR Usage Poll. If you haven't in the AWR Poll, please do so.

While the web site does provide a chart of results, those results don't include the extra comments made by poll takers. You may are may not be able to download all the results, I'm not sure if that is restricted to the poll owner.

Nonetheless, I have compiled the results from a 100 or so respondents in to an Excel workbook, along with a few charts. You may find some of the additional comments of interest as well. AWR Usage Results

Draw your own conclusions regarding these results. I think it interesting to that AWR appears to be quite widely used. Personally I fall into the category of not using it because of the expense. I may work on changing that for a couple of key servers, as AWR is not that expensive, but in a small shop, spending $20k on feature that is not often needed is sometimes a hard sell.

One question I purposely left out was "Do you use AWR even though you have not licensed it"? While it might satisfy the curiosity of some (including me) I didn't want to give any Oracle sales people (or Oracle attorneys for that matter) any reasons to contact me regarding the poll.

In retrospect a good question would have been: "Did you realize AWR/ASH is a separately licensed product?". Too late to add that now, but bringing that up quite often leads to lively discussion.

Another interesting bit was that a few people have extended STATSPACK in some way, even using it on Oracle 10g+. One even mentioned the excellent repository of statspack scripts assembled by Tim Gorman. Tim Gorman's Statspack Scripts