AWR and Oracle Licensing

Oracle 10g, 11g

When 10g came along, we thought we were getting some great new performance monitoring and tuning tools to help us diagnose problems and generally make sure our database was running smoothly. This seemed to come in the form of the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR). 

All sorts of articles were written about how you can use AWR to troubleshoot various performance problems that you may be having. Many forums and articles showed off how STATSPACK had been eclipsed by AWR, and countless more have written examples on how to use AWR. Testing Oracle 10g for the first time, I was really excited about AWR. 

"Look how easy it is! And it's installed and available by default!" 

Well, yes it is, but actually.... you're not allowed to use it! 

AWR Report missing diagnostic information with ORA-20023 errors

Oracle 11g Release 1 

I seem to be hitting all of the AWR report bugs lately. The latest one is that the AWR report is missing data and shows lots of errors of the form:

WARNING (-20023)
ORA-20023: Missing start and end values for time model stat: parse time elapsed

A bit of searching on Metalink reveals that this seems to be a bug (#7532789) and is discussed in document 1181573.1. The bug information seems to note Enteprise edition only, but I have found the problem on Standard edition too.

AWR snapshot creation hangs

Oracle 10g R1

I encountered a problem with the AWR snapshot in which the creation would hang. This phenomenon is due to an Oracle bug #7284976. The Metalink bug report indicates that it is applicable to DB version 10.2.0.3 Enterprise Edition and doesn't list any other affected versions, however I seem to be encountering this on DB version 10.1.0.4 Standard Edition running on IBM AIX platform.