Where’s the “Go Faster” switch?

Oracle has been around for over 25 years and I’ve been working with it for over 10 of them, but I still haven’t found the “Go Faster” switch. Now either I’m not too clever, or this switch doesn’t actually exist. If the latter is true, why is it people ask me questions about tuning and don’t like the answer when I suggest they need to do some work to solve the problem?

People generally don’t want to hear they have to trace the slow process so they can see what statements are executed and check out the execution plans and waits associated with the statements. The don’t want to run the profiler to see which bits of procedural logic are taking the most time. They just want a switch to flick to make everything better. For this reason I’m going to raise an enhancement request for the following statement to be supported:

ALTER SYSTEM SET go_faster=TRUE;

I don’t care that it does nothing. I just want it to give the “System altered.” message. Then the next time I have someone looking for a shortcut I can say, just flick the GO_FASTER switch and tell you boss everything will be OK.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I would prefer this parameter to remain undocumented and unsupported, since that seems to add to the mystique 🙂