21.2 Spotlight

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Spotlight on Oracle is an excellent tool for real-time monitoring and reactive, not predictive, tuning of busy production databases.

With respect to physical tuning Spotlight can do much and its GUI is of excellent caliber. Spotlight can be used for SQL code tuning as well. However, it is best used as a monitoring and physical tuning advisory tool.

Figure 21.12 shows the primary screen in Spotlight on Oracle, used for monitoring a busy Oracle production database. Different colors represent different levels of alert: green being OK, red being serious, or just panic!

Figure 21.12: Spotlight on Oracle Main Monitoring Screen

There are an enormous number of subset screens in Spotlight on Oracle, for every aspect of Oracle Database tuning imaginable. Figure 21.13 shows a screen displaying real time usage of the Shared Global Area (SGA) for a database.

Figure 21.13: Spotlight SGA View

Figure 21.14 shows a mixture of various views from Spotlight with both textual and instantly recognizable graphical displays.

Figure 21.14: Various Spotlight Views

Spotlight is a very comprehensive tuning and monitoring tool for Oracle Database, especially in the area of real time production database monitoring. As already stated many non-Oracle Corporation produced Oracle database monitoring and tuning tools are available. Spotlight is one of the most comprehensive and useful of those tools I have used in relation to its price.

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