Amazon RDS Performance Insights now supports query execution plan capture for RDS for Oracle

Amazon RDS Performance Insights now supports collection and tracking of query execution plans for Amazon RDS for Oracle, so you can more easily identify if a change in the query execution plan is the cause of a worse performing or a stuck query.

A query execution plan is a sequence of steps used to access data in a relational database management system (RDBMS). The RDBMS query optimizer chooses the optimal execution plan from many alternative ways to execute a given query, with widely varying performance. Because query optimizers do not always make the most optimal choice, database users and administrators sometimes need to manually examine and tune the plans to improve performance. Correlating this performance data can take hours without specialized expertise.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights helps you identify the most resource-intensive SQL queries on a visual dashboard in seconds. Now, RDS Performance Insights also collects the query execution plans of those same resource-intensive SQL queries in RDS for Oracle, and stores them over time. You can determine if a change in performance of a SQL query is due to a different query execution plan, and if so, make improvements to your application to optimize the query, add or remove an index, or scale up your database.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature of RDS that allows you to visually assess the load on your database and determine when and where to take action. With one click in the Amazon RDS Management Console, you can add a fully-managed performance monitoring solution to your Amazon RDS database. RDS Performance Insights is included with supported Amazon Aurora clusters and Amazon RDS instances, and stores seven days of performance history in a rolling window at no additional cost. If you need longer-term retention, you can choose to pay for up to two years of performance history retention.

For a complete list of regions where RDS Performance Insights is offered, see AWS Regions. To learn more about RDS Performance Insights and supported database engines, read the Amazon RDS User Guide.