There exists a fair amount of confusion around one of the most famous Oracle errors — ORA-01555 (“snapshot too old”). The difficulty is probably coming from the fact that ORA-01555 is related to internal workings of undo generation and usage in an Oracle database, which a rather complex. Because of that, when this error on their system, inexperienced DBAs and developers often either start looking at UNDO-related parameters, rollback segment sizes, etc., or start looking for any suspicious activity, which they later link to excessive undo “consumption” or “generation”.

Continue reading ““Snapshot too old” as a performance issue in disguise” →