Oracle Tips  by Burleson Consulting

The Data Warehouse Development Life Cycle

Parallelism And Oracle Data Warehousing
The V$LOCK_ACTIVITY View

The V$:LOCK_ACTIVITY view is a very good way to determine if you have reached the maximum lock convert rate for your DLM. Because the maximum lock convert rate is unique to each vendor's DLM, you need to compare the results from V$:LOCK_ACTIVITY with the maximum values in your OS vendor's documentation for their DLM. Regardless, if the maximum lock convert rate has been reached, you will need to repartition the application to balance alike transactions into common instances.

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This is an excerpt from "High Performance Data Warehousing". To learn more about Oracle, try "Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference", by Donald K. Burleson.  You can buy it direct from the publisher at 30% off here:
http://www.rampant-books.com/book_1002_oracle_tuning_definitive_reference_2nd_ed.htm