ASH Report

In Oracle, ASH stands for Active Session History. An ASH report details statistics from the inmemory performance monitoring tables. The report provides:

Top User Events (frequent wait events)

Details to the wait events

Top Queries

Top Sessions

Top Blocking Sessions

Top DB Objects (Note: be wary of the QRTZ_LOCKS result. This table is what Quartz,
our third-party Java scheduler, uses as a locking mechanism. As a result, any contention
is intentional and will not affect performance).

Activity Over Time

The simplest way to generate this report is through the Oracle Enterprise Manager tool (OEM);
however, there are times when this tool is not available. On those occasions, the DBA user can
generate the report from the machine hosting Oracle, as described in the steps below.

Active Session History (ASH)

Oracle collects Active Session History (ASH) statistics (mostly wait statistics for different
events) for all active sessions every second from v$session and stores them in a circular FIFO
buffer in the SGA. ASH records are very recent session history within the last 5-10 mins. The
MMNL (Manageability Monitor light - shows up as "Manageability Monitor light 2" process)
process, if the buffer fills up before the AWR flushes (by default every hour) the MMNL process
will flush the data to disk (data stored in dba_hist_active_session_history).

ASH resides in the SGA and its size is calculated by the lesser of:

total # of cpu x 2MB memory

5% of shared pool

So on a 16 cpu server with a shared pool of 500MB

Ash desired size 16 x 2MB = 32MB

5% of 500MB = 25MB (this is the lower so ASH will be 25MB)

ASH collects the following:

SQL_ID

SID

Client ID, Service ID

Program, Module, Action

Object, File, Block

Wait event number, actual wait time (if session is waiting)

Useful Views

V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY

stores the history session history of every session, collects this i

every second from v$session, this is the circular buffer and olde
information will be rewritten over.

V$SESSION

this view holds all the sessions information (72 columns of info

DBA_HIST_ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY

provides historical information about recent active session histo

basically snapshots from v$active_session_history.

ASH Report
It is possible to run a report on the ASH data collected, the report generates information about
SQL that ran during the time you specify and it includes blocking and wait details.
ashrpt.sql

information on SQL which includes blocking and wait details, the script will ask what yo
specify a time and if the report is to be generated in text to html.

Note: report is in $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin