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.

Many new Oracle features require new memory structures, which are commonly cached in the shared pool. This has created an incredibly difficult technical problem for Oracle software architects. Not only are the existing memory structures difficult to manage together, but with the constant addition of new memory structures, the requirements continue to change. This forces memory management optimization to remain flexible while at the same time being pushed, we hope, toward optimal performance. But regardless of the challenge and the claims, as they say, it is what it is, and that is what we, as performance analysts, have to deal with.