ORA-04030: out of process memory opening a cursor

Question

Hi,
We are wonking on Oracle 9i dedicated server OLTP.
When a Pro*C process tries to open a big query cursor the ORA-04030 is returned by Oracle. Below is the query plan:
| Id  | Operation                 |  Name           | Rows  | Bytes | Cost  |
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT          |                 |    41 |  4182 |  1038K|
|   1 |  SORT UNIQUE              |                 |    41 |  4182 |  1038K|
|   2 |   HASH JOIN               |                 |    41 |  4182 |  1038K|
|   3 |    VIEW                   |                 |   157K|  8002K|   164K|
|   4 |     SORT UNIQUE           |                 |   157K|    11M|   162K|
|   5 |      HASH JOIN            |                 |   157K|    11M|   160K|
|   6 |       VIEW                |                 |  3151K|   126M| 51970 |
|   7 |        SORT ORDER BY      |                 |  3151K|   117M| 51970 |
|   8 |         TABLE ACCESS FULL | RE_ASNEF        |  3151K|   117M| 17637 |
|   9 |       VIEW                |                 |  6427K|   208M| 89856 |
|  10 |        SORT ORDER BY      |                 |  6427K|   214M| 89856 |
|  11 |         HASH JOIN         |                 |  6427K|   214M| 25130 |
|  12 |          TABLE ACCESS FULL| TIPO_CLIENTE    |    21 |   357 |     2 |
|  13 |          TABLE ACCESS FULL| LISTA_CLIENTES  |    11M|   204M| 25084 |
|  14 |    VIEW                   |                 |    12M|   599M|   861K|
|  15 |     SORT ORDER BY         |                 |    12M|   695M|   861K|
|  16 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL    | RECIBOS         |    12M|   695M|   670K|
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------We guess that the problem is that the dedicated server process is triying to allocate more memory that allowed by OS per process:
cobros1p:$ ulimit -a
time(seconds)        unlimited
file(blocks)         unlimited
data(kbytes)         131072
stack(kbytes)        32768
memory(kbytes)       32768       <<<-----
coredump(blocks)     2097151
nofiles(descriptors) 2000OS memory limit can´t be increased, so we guess that one posible solution is to split the query using temporary tables to reduce "hash join/sort" PGA space.
Are we right? Any hint about other possible solutions?
Thanks in advance,
Jose Luis

Answer 1

From various notes you can find on MOS about 4030:
"Each Operating System will handle memory allocations with Oracle slightly differently."
"The application developer of an Oracle precompiler program or OCI program can explicitly open cursors, or handles to specific private SQL areas, and use them as a named resource throughout the execution of the program. Recursive cursors that Oracle issues implicitly for some SQL statements also use shared SQL areas.
The management of private SQL areas is the responsibility of the user process. The allocation and deallocation of private SQL areas depends largely on which application tool you are using, although the number of private SQL areas that a user process can allocate is always limited by the initialization parameter OPEN_CURSORS. The default value of this parameter is 50.
A private SQL area continues to exist until the corresponding cursor is closed or the statement handle is freed. Although Oracle frees the runtime area after the statement completes, the persistent area remains waiting. Application developers close all open cursors that will not be used again to free the persistent area and to minimize the amount of memory required for users of the application. "
"However, from within the database framework you cannot place a hard limit on the size of a process by setting any initialization parameters or database configuration.
You can limit the size of a process from the OS side by setting kernel limits or user shell limits.
However, this leads to the ORA-4030 and will cause transaction rollback."
You need to have some serious discussions with both your app developers and your OS admins, though if you are running something from the last century, that could be pointless.