Thanks for performing the Google search – I tried, but initially did not search on that keyword. Good idea to check the scheduled run frequency – if this AWR report covers a one hour time period, the above SQL statement is executed an average of three times per second (by different sessions, obviously because of the 1.90 second average elapsed time for the SQL statement).

It appears that the OP is not alone, as the Google search found another company experiencing similar problems with a query that appears to be quite similar:
http://www.freelists.org/post/oracle-l/DB-Performance-Issue
If we ignore the fact that the other database has CURSOR_SHARING set to either FORCE or SIMILAR, it appears that BMC attempted to modify the program’s queries since the time of the post on the Oracle L list in 2007, so that the queries no longer specify the deprecated RULE hint.

The Google search also apparently found the manual for the product:
ftp://ftp.bmc.com/pub/patrol/patches/PKM_ORACLE/NT/8.9.00/PATROL%20for%20Oracle%20User%20Guide.pdf
On page 332 of the manual, we see that the programmers of this product are a bit too creative with extent size definitions:

I’d start by looking at how frequently this job is scheduled to run.

You might be correct regarding the intended use of this SQL statement.

Something possibly interesting, an extension of my third bullet point at the end of this article. What if the segment described by this (returned by the main SELECT clause):

NVL(MIN(DSE.MAXEXTS - DSE.EXTENTS), 111)

Is not the same object as described by this (also returned by the main SELECT clause):

NVL(MIN(ROUND(DSE.MAXEXTS - DSE.EXTENTS) * 100 / DSE.MAXEXTS), 100)

This is definitely one of those SQL statements that makes people (at least me) stop and think for a couple of minutes. I am beginning to wonder if the real task is *not* to improve the performance of this SQL statement.

I too would be asking the purpose of this. It rather looks like do it yourself space management (am I about to run out of extents.) But I can’t see a) why you would do this and b) why you would do this 10k times.

Niall

/*+ FAST PERFORMANCE  FROST_ROWS_10 */

As demonstrated here:
http://hoopercharles.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/adding-comments-to-sql-statements-improves-performance/#comment-2680

There is a very recent thread on the comp.databases.oracle.server Usenet group about hints, but it is too bad that not all RDBMS platforms support the FAST PERFORMANCE hints
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.databases.oracle.server/browse_thread/thread/6ba1d443103eabcd/4219a0a25edf1677

'DATAPOINT EXTENTS_LEFT '  || ' ' ||

And I have no idea how MIN(DSE.MAXEXTS – DSE.EXTENTS) could be of any interest.

(Sorry, I had to edit your comment – the original comment was blocked by the Akismet spam filter.)