How to remove blocks from buffer cache for a specific object

Question

hi everybody,
is it possible to remove blocks which belogns to a specific object (a table for ex) from buffer cache.
as you know, there is
alter system flush buffer_cache;command but it does it's job for all buffer cache. if you ask me why i want this, for tuning reasons. I want to test some plsql codes when they run as if they are running for the first time (reading from disk).
ps: I use oracle 11g r2

Answer 1

Hi mustafa,
Your performance will not degrade if you run the query second time ( if i understood correctly, you worry about the performance if you execute the procedure second time). Executing/running the code/sql statements over and over again will have following two good benefits.
1) This will avoid hard parsing (Hard parsing is resource intensive operation and this generally increase the overall processing time.
2) This will avoid physical read IO (You gonna see the benefits if data blocks already cached and you dont have to spend time in reading blocks from disk. Reading from disk is much costlier and time consuming operation as compared to data in RAM)
Having that said sometime bad written queries will acquire more blocks then required and consume most part of buffer cache, and this can some times effect the other important blocks and force to flush out from buffer cache.
Oracle have built some intelligence for large full table scan operations for e.g will doing full table scan(I hope you already know what is fts) oracle will put its blocks at end of LRU chain. So these will be the buffers will would flush out first then any other.
From oracle documentation:
"When the user process is performing a full table scan, it reads the blocks of the table into buffers and puts them on the LRU end (instead of the MRU end) of the LRU list. This is because a fully scanned table usually is needed only briefly, so the blocks should be moved out quickly to leave more frequently used blocks in the cache.
You can control this default behavior of blocks involved in table scans on a table-by-table basis. To specify that blocks of the table are to be placed at the MRU end of the list during a full table scan, use the CACHE clause when creating or altering a table or cluster. You can specify this behavior for small lookup tables or large static historical tables to avoid I/O on subsequent accesses of the table."
Regards
Edited by: 909592 on Feb 6, 2012 4:37 PM