The Latching Algorithm.

Types of Locks
Before we dwelve into to the deep of latches, first we need to see what are the types of locks in Oracle.

Application Locks
These are the locks which are used by the application developers.For example the statement
Code (Text):
Select name,address from emp for update;
is such type of lock and when this statement is executed, any other user is unable to perform any dml/ddl on the table except query.

Data Dictionary Locks
These are the locks aquired when we execute some kind of DDL.For example, When we create a table,the data dictionary must be updated with the details.So the tables like tab$,col$ have to locked just like above.

Memory Structure locks or Latches
In a quite similer way as to above, we need to lock memory based structures from access by other processes while a process is reading or executing it. These not quite "Locks" , but as these are protecting the memory structures from accidental modification, these are known as "Latches". Unlike the Locks and Enqueues, they do not maintain any order while allocating to processes.

Oracle Latch can be defined as protection structures which ensure serial execution of the related code thereby ensuring that Oracle cache is not corrupted resulting in the corruption of the data.

Latches surround the particluer code and ensure that they are accessed by one and only one process, even if it is doing only read. For example, the latch that protects the library cache kernel code is called the library cache latch.Before the execution of the library cache kernel code , the process must acquire the library cache latch and keep it acquired until the execution of the code.

The Latching Algorithm.
The latches are requested by the processes in two ways. The "Immediate Mode" and the "Willing to Wait Mode"

Immediate Mode
In this mode, a process could ask for a latch and if it fails to acquire it, the control is returned to the process.

Willing to Wait Mode.
In this mode, a process could ask for a latch and if it fails to acquire it, it keeps on requesting it for a specified number of times (this is called spinning on the latch and the number of spins is given by the now hidden parameter _spin_count) and if it still fails acquire it, goes to a sleep, wakes up after certain interval and repeats the whole process (Spin and sleep).This process continues until the process acquires the latch or the user cancels the operation.

The interesting thing to note here is the timing of this whole process. When a process is spinning on a latch, it is consuming CPU and while it is sleeping, it is idle.Accordingly, when the process is spinning, the timing is recorded as the CPU time and when it is sleeping , it is recorded as a wait event,i.e., the latch free event.So, whenever a latch free event occurs, we know that the process has gone to sleep and it has consumed some CPU time while spinning.It can be clearly seen from the this fact that increasing the value of the parameter _spin_count is actually bad, it makes the process consume more cpu time and thereby increasing the cpu bottleneck.


https://alexzeng.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/expert-oracle-practices-troubleshooting-latch-contention/


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