Finally, upon issuing either one of the preceding code snippets, you can easily check to ensure the object is indeed being kept. For example, Figure 7-15 (which does not show cursors) will clearly show the trader.buy procedure with the Kept? column set to YES.

Figure 7-15. Shown is a recently restarted instance with the trader.buy procedure kept (pinned) in the shared pool. While kept, the procedure has not been executed yet, so the script parameters had to be set to 0 for the buy procedure to display.

I'm frequently asked how often to refine the pin list. Personally, I don't like to invoke any database change until I have a very good reason. A good reason for refining your pin list is if your system has suddenly started experiencing shared pool latch contention or has encountered 4031 errors. This is very important: From a more proactive posture, refine the pin list if application functionality is added, an application upgrade occurs, or application usage significantly changes.