Time for a quick break from the final push to complete the course slides. I’ve (probably foolishly) decided to apply the 10.2.0.4 patch to my test database.

As I was confirming the details of when Oracle starts to flush information from the ASH Buffer to the workload repository, I thought I’d check the value as it’s defined in a hidden parameter, _ash_eflush_trigger. The default is 66, which means that the flush begins whenever the circular buffer is 66% used, to stop it from wrapping around on itself, or filling up, whichever description you prefer.