9 In case you're wondering about my test, the negative query performance did not occur because my test data volume was not that large. Beware of low data volume tests!

11 Setting and resetting the intial and maximum number of ITLs can be easily performed by a command such as alter table T1 initrans 10 or alter table T1 maxtrans 10.

It's much more than sharing SQL. When the shared pool was introduced in Oracle 7, it was the answer to a particularly vexing problem of the continual reparsing of SQL statements, along with all their related memory management. But while the initial focus of the shared pool was in sharing SQL statements and programmatic structures, it has grown into a behemoth cache full of every imaginable type of memory structure, complete with a wide variety of requirements from size, to access patterns, to cache duration.