Viewing queries in v$sqlarea

Starting with Oracle9i, users have the ability to view the estimated CPU, TEMP and I/O costs for every SQL execution plan step. Oracle Corporation has noted that typical OLTP databases are becomingly increasingly CPU-bound and has provided the ability for the DBA to make the optimizer consider the CPU costs associated with each SQL execution step.

The developers of Oracle10g recognized this trend toward CPU-based optimization by providing the ability to choose CPU-based or I/O-based costing during SQL optimization, with the 10g default being CPU-costing. In Oracle10g, system stats are gathered by default, and in Oracle9i the DBA must manually execute the dbms_stat.gather_system_stats package to get CBO statistics.

alter session set "_optimizer_cost_model"=choose;   
alter session set "_optimizer_cost_model"=io;  
alter session set "_optimizer_cost_model"=cpu; 

Here is a good script:

select
   to_number(decode(SID, 65535, NULL, SID)) sid,
   operation_type              OPERATION,
   trunc(WORK_AREA_SIZE/1024)  WSIZE, 
   trunc(EXPECTED_SIZE/1024)   ESIZE,
   trunc(ACTUAL_MEM_USED/1024) MEM, 
   trunc(MAX_MEM_USED/1024)    "MAX MEM", 
   number_passes               PASS
from
   v$sql_workarea_active
order by
   1,2;

I have more complete details and scripts in my latest book, Oracle Tuning.