Commercial database customers across the board list SQL performance tuning as one of the most time-consuming tasks for database administrators (DBAs). The 10g Oracle Database provides a feature called the SQL Tuning Advisor to simplify the task. The 11g release adds a new database feature, called Automatic SQL Tuning, that closes the feedback loop for the first time, fully automating the SQL tuning workflow and solving some SQL performance problems without any DBA intervention.

Execution plans for SQL statements have a significant impact on the overall performance of database systems. New optimizer statistics, configuration parameter changes, software upgrades and hardware resource utilization are among a multitude of factors that may cause the query optimizer to generate new plans. While most of these plan changes are beneficial or benign, a few rogue plans can potentially wreak havoc on system performance or availability, affecting critical and time-sensitive business application needs. The normally desirable ability of a query optimizer to adapt to system changes may sometimes cause it to pick a sub-optimal plan compromising the stability of the system. In this paper, we present the new SQL Plan Management feature in Oracle 11g. It provides a comprehensive solution for managing plan changes to provide stable and optimal performance for a set of SQL statements. Two of its most important goals are preventing sub-optimal plans from being executed while allowing new plans to be used if they are verifiably better than previous plans. This feature is tightly integrated with Oracle's query optimizer. SQL Plan Management is available to users via both command-line and graphical interfaces. We describe the feature and then, using an industrial-strength application suite, present experimental results that show that SQL Plan Management provides stable and optimal performance for SQL statements with no performance regressions.