Shared latches by Oracle version

As I described in my previous post, Shared and Exclusive Oracle latches differ significantly. Shared latch behaves like enqueue. It has S and X incompatible modes. Moreover  X mode serializes the shared latch. The contention for shared and exclusive latches has different patterns. This leads to different methods to tune such contentions.

But we do not know which latches are shared. Oracle never published the list of shared latches. Every time looking in the AWR or Statspack report we had to guess the type of contending latch. We only know that “cache buffer chains” latches became shared since in 9.2.

Oracle executable internally determines that latch is shared using flag hidden somewhere in x$kslld (v$latchname) structure. Google search shows that  KSLLD means  [K]ernel [S]ervice [L]ock [L]atch [D]escriptor. Unfortunately this shared flag was not externalized to SQL. It is possible to check the flag manually using oradebug peek or DTrace. But the flag offset is version and platform dependent. We need more systematic way to determine the latch type.

Shared latch behaves like enqueue

We know a lot about the exclusive latches. This is Oracle realization of TTS spinlocks. Only one process at a time can hold the exclusive latch. Other processes compete for the exclusive latch by spinning. If process can not get the latch by spinning, it will wait until the latch becomes free.

But since the version 8.0 Oracle had another spinlock – shared latch. This is a realization of “Read-Write” spinlocks. Such spinlocks can be held by several “reader” processes simultaneously in SHARED mode. But if the process needs to write to the protected structure it must acquire RW spinlock in EXCLUSIVE mode. This mode prevents any concurrent access to the latch.

From version to version the number of shared latch increased. Several widely known latches like “session idle bit”, “In memory undo latch”. “Result Cache: RC Latch”, “resmgr group change latch” are shared.

Famous “cache buffers chains” latch was also became shared in Oracle 9.2. We usually react on “cache buffers chains” latch contention finding ineffective SQL plans and “hot blocks”. Recently Kyle Hailey posted an excellent graphical explanation of Oracle mechanics related to “latch: cache buffers chains” contention. But it always was a mystery to me why the sessions have to wait for SHARED latch during READ operations like searching the hash chains. Other busy shared latches like “session idle bit” do not experience such contention. This is why I would like to dive deeper into shared latch internals.