Apply controls to types of activities with work action sets

Work action sets contain work actions that apply controls to activities of a certain type in a specific service superclass, in a specific workload, or to the database as a whole.

A work action provides an action that can be applied to a work class, which represent activities of a certain type like LOAD or READ activities. Work actions are applied to the activities that fall within the work class to which the work action was applied before the activity begins to execute. If, however, the work action is PREVENT EXECUTION, the activity will be prevented from running and no other work action will be applied to it.

If you apply a work action set to a database, there are several types of actions that you can apply to activities that fall within a work class, such as threshold definitions, prevent execution, collect activity data, and count activity. Defining a threshold for a work action is the most powerful database work action. For example, perhaps you want to prevent SQL from reading and returning more than 100 000 rows. You can define a single work class for a work action set that identifies SQL READ statements and a work action with a threshold that would stop execution if the number of rows returned is more than 100 000. For information about the possible actions, see Work actions and the work action set domain.

If you apply a work action set to a workload, the different types of actions that you can apply to activities include defining thresholds, preventing execution, collecting activity data and aggregate activity data, and counting the activities.

If you define the work action set for a service superclass, the different types of actions that you can apply to activities include mapping activities to a service subclass, preventing execution, collecting activity or aggregate activity data, and counting the activities. Typically, the work action maps an activity to a service subclass and has thresholds defined on the subclass to help manage the activity.

Figure 1. Work action set mapping for a service superclass