Hi there,
Oracle has started using mutexes and it is said that they are more efficient as compared to latches.
Questions
1)What is mutex?I know mutex are mutual exclusions and they are the concept of multiple threads.What I want to know that how this concept is implemented in Oracledatabase?
2) How they are better than latches?both are used for low level locking so how one is better than the other?
Any input is welcome.
Thanks and regards
Aman....

Chris,
Thanks for the reply.
1) Yes I understand that they are exactly nothing but the low level locks on the memory structures to protect their integerity.Thats the same thing that is latches are meant for.
Ok the benefits that you have mentioned , out of that the shared and exclusive mode access looks the relevant one. The other one is same with the latches as they are also acquired in the same mode of immediate or willing to wait correct ?
2) Well the smaller is indeed there.The faster I amnot sure still why. What Orcle says , that as like latches which are available for either one or multiple structures as one resource manager , so their contention can also come.This can be leading to an assumption to a "false contention" sort of thing like suppose there are lots of sessions looking for statements in the shared pool than the library cache latch will come under contention. Now this is a false contention if we just look at it as if sessions are looking for soft parsed cursors than its a good thing but because the looking mechanism, latch is not available so its actualy is a contention which will be removed with the help of mutexes as they wil be allocated as per the the structure so there wont be a starvation issue like latches with them. I am sure besides this , there must be some thing more relevant for mutexes also there which I am trying to look.
Thanks a bunch for the input and reply.
Aman....

First some definition of mutex for people not familiar with the term

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_exclusion

Second,
Aman,
Can you post an official article the talking about mutex implementation from Oracle?

In Oracle, latches and mutexes are different things and managed using different modules. KSL* modules for latches and KGX* for mutexes.

As Chris said, general mutex operatins require less CPU instructions than latch operations (as they aren't as sophisticated as latches and don't maintain get/miss counts as latches do).

But the main scalability benefit comes from that there's a mutex structure in each child cursor handle and the mutex itself acts as cursor pin structure. So if you have a cursor open (or cached in session cursor cache) you don't need to get the library cache latch (which was previously needed for changing cursor pin status), but you can modify the cursor's mutex refcount directly (with help of pointers in open cursor state area in sessions UGA).

Therefore you have much higher scalability when pinning/unpinning cursors (no library cache latching needed, virtually no false contention) and no separate pin structures need to be allocated/maintained.

Few notes:
1) library cache latching is still needed for parsing etc, the mutexes address only the pinning issue in library cache
2) mutexes are currently used for library cache cursors (not other objects like PL/SQL stored procs, table defs etc)
3) As mutexes are a generic mechanism (not library cache specific) they're used in V$SQLSTATS underlying structures too
4) When mutexes are enabled, you won't see cursor pins from X$KGLPN anymore (as X$KGLPN is a fixed table based on the KGL pin array - which wouldn't be used for cursors anymore)

--
Tanel Poder
http://blog.tanelpoder.com

Tanel,
Excellent! Thats a good explanation. Thanks for it. I got one document sent to me just now which explains in good detail about mutexes and their benefits in Oracle. Combining that with your info,its a good one for me for now. Thanks for the explanation.
Regards,
Aman....

Excellent answer, as usual. My response was directed to yingkuan's wikipedia reference, which says that a mutex is a generic mutual exclusion device, including semaphores and latches.

No issues yingkuan.I did search than only I posted. I have got a generic document.if you and anyone else wants, buzz me. Its not really like the Tanel's explanation but still much better as compared to any other doc that I did read about it.
Aman....