After reading this chapter, you should have a much better appreciation for the massive technical challenge Oracle undertook and continues to undertake with caching objects of various sizes, duration, and access patterns, and understand their relationships. Of course this complexity has led to a lot of pain for everyone involved: users, performance analysts, Oracle support, and I'm sure the Oracle kernel developers. But as with most pieces of software, if you're serious about improvement and expanding the scope, it can done.

Oracle has made tremendous strides in the shared pool. As a result, for every problem a performance analyst is likely to encounter, there are a number of solutions. In fact, Oracle has taken this so seriously that some of the solutions can be invoked with an alter system or even an alter session command. In the coming years, I suspect we'll see even greater things occur in the shared pool.

1 I suspect the trend will continue. As shared pool memory management continues to improve, Oracle will be more confident in placing more and more distinctly different objects into this single large cache.