Introduction
Active session history (ASH), available since 10g, is one of the greatest performance troubleshooting tools available for Oracle databases. And one of most underutilized, too. In this article I will give some basic guidelines regarding ASH usage, and will list some of my favorite ASH queries.
ASH is a view (V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY). It can give most of the information found in trace files, but unlike tracing, it’s always on!
Using ASH is extremely simple, because you don’t have enable any events or go to database server filesystem to retrieve the results: you just query the view. However, there are a few basic rules that allow to use ASH with maximum efficiency, and minize the risk of misinterpreting its output.
Oracle Diagnostician 