Oracle Database 12c: Enterprise Manager Database Express

Oracle Database 12c says goodbye to a tool being around after the 10gR1: the Database Console.

OC4J for the 10g and weblogic for the 11g, both have had a non-negligible overhead on the systems, especially with many configured instances.

In many cases I’ve decided to switch to Grid/Cloud Control for the main reason to avoid too many db consoles, in other cases I’ve just disabled at all web management.

The new 12c brings a new tool called Database Express (indeed, very similar to its predecessors).


Where’s my emca/emctl?

The DB Express runs entirely with pl/sql code within the XDB schema. It’s XDB that leverages its features to enable a web-based console, and it’s embedded by default in the database.

To enable it, it’s necessary to check that the parameter dispatchers is enabled for XDB:

and then set an https port unique on the server:

If you’ve already done it but you don’t remember the port number you can get it with this query:

You can now access the web interface by using the address:

 

db_express_home

db_express

Lower footprint, less features

From one side DB Express is thin (but not always fast on my laptop…), from the other it has clearly fewer features comparing to the DB Console.

It’s not clear to me if Oracle wants to make it more powerful in future releases or if it’s a move to force everybody to use something else (SQLDeveloper or EM12c Cloud Control). However the DBA management plugin of the current release of SQL Developer is fully compatible with the 12c, including the ability to manage pluggable databases:sqldev_pluggable_db

So is the EM 12c Cloud Control, so you have plenty of choice to manage your 12c databases from graphical interfaces.

Stay tuned!

Ludovico

Oracle Database 12c: RMAN recover at table level

Brett Jordan David MacdonaldOracle Database 12c comes with a new feature named “RMAN table level recovery”.

After a quick try it’s easy to understand that we are talking about Tablespace Point-in-Time Recovery (TSPITR) with some automation to have it near-transparent.

 

How to launch it

The syntax is quite trivial. Suppose you’ve dropped a table ludovico.reco and then purged it (damn!) then you can’t flashback it to before drop and don’t want to flashback the entire database.

 

You can recover the table with:

 

You identify the schema.table:partition to restore, optionally you can pass the pluggable database containing the table to recover, the time definition as usual (scn, seq# or timestamp) and an auxiliary destination.

This Auxiliary destination is well-known to be mandatory for TSPITR. You can pass other options like table renaming or tablespace remapping.

Off course, the database must be open in read-write, in archivelog mode and at least one successful backup must be taken.

How it works

Oracle prepare an auxiliary instance by restoring the SYSTEM, UNDO and SYSAUX tablespaces.

Then it opens in READ-ONLY mode the partial database.

 

It uses then the read-only dictionary to take the tablespace that was containing the table before the data loss. This tablespace (users in my example) is restored and recovered, and the database is opened.

 

At this  point, RMAN starts an export/import with datapump to move the table from the auxiliary database back to the target database:

 

Finally, the auxiliary instance is cleaned:

 

We can check if our table is ok:

 

Oh, and yes, now we can select directly from RMAN! 🙂

 

 My opinion

  • It still needs the amount of space needed to recover the auxiliary instance (system, sysaux, temp and the user tablespace containing the missing data), so it has all the defeats of the typical TSPITR, but it’s automatic so is an improvement for the real life.
  • Restoring the user tablespace separately from the system tablespaces can be an issue if you’re saving backupsets over tape: you can end up by reading twice the same backupset that could be read once instead.

Cheers

Ludovico

Oracle Database 12c: sequence.nextval as default and identity columns

Finally! I can count how many times I’ve seen questions like this one.

The new Oracle 12c now allows to define a table with the sequence.nextval directly in the in-line column definition:

 

But Oracle has fixed this twice, in the new release it’s possible to use identity columns as well, avoiding the necessity to create explicitly a new sequence:

I’ve said “explicitly” because actually a sequence is created with a system-generated name, so you’ll still need to deal with sequences.

 

cheers

Ludo

Oracle Database 12c: move datafile online

The new Oracle Database 12c allows to move datafiles ONLINE while they’re been used. This allows great availability when dealing with database moving, compared to the previous approach.

Pre 12c:

  • copy datafile with RMAN
  • offline datafile
  • switch datafile to copy
  • recover datafile
  • alter datafile online

From 12c:

  • move the datafile! 🙂

The actual command for moving the datafile is:

where the source can be specified using the file#, or the actual path.

The destination must be specified only if moving to a non-OMF file, otherwise it takes the db_create_file_dest parameter:

in the latter it will move the system datafile back to my +DATA diskgroup.

So, it’s a great enhancement to move database:

  • from a storage to another without using ASM
  • migrating online from an ASM DG to another
  • moving from FS to ASM and viceversa
  • (not tested) move datafiles on Windows from a logical disk to another!
  • etc.

Full example (including some information on the proper MV enqueue):

Controlfiles cannot be moved online yet. The other kind of files (temp and redo logs) off course can be moved easily by creating the new ones and deleting the old ones, as it was on pre-12c releases.

Cheers

Ludo

Oracle Database 12c: Multithreaded Execution (or how make processes decrease)

http://subeteanime.blogspot.ch/ (cc) Too many background processes

Oracle instances on Unix/Linux servers have been composed historically by separated server processes to allow the database to be multi-user, in opposite with Windows that has always been multithread (Oracle 7 on MS-DOS was a single-user process, but this is prehistory…). The background processes number has increased to support all the new features of Oracle, up to this new Oracle 12c release. On a simple database installation you’ll be surprised to have this output from a ps command (38 processes):

If you have consolidated many databases without the pluggable database feature, you’ll end up to have several hundreds of processes even without users connected. But Oracle 12c now introduce the possibility to start an instance using multithreading instead of the traditional processes. This could lead to some optimizations due to the shared process memory, and reduced context switches overhead, I presume (need to test it).

 

Enabling the Multithreaded Execution

By default this feature is not enabled, so you have to set it explicitly:

And in parallel, you’ll need to add this line to the listener.ora:

After a restart, the instance will show only a bunch of processes:

The remaining processes

So we have the Process Monitor (pmon), the Process Spawner (psp0), the Virtual Keeper of Time (vktm), the Database Writer (dbw0) and two new multithreaded processes (u004) and (u005). “U” can stand for User or Unified?

 

Where can I find the information on the other processes?

They still exist in the v$process view, thus leading to some confusion when talking about Oracle Processes with your sysadmins… The new EXECUTION_TYPE column show if the Oracle Process is executed as a thread or as an OS process, and the SPID let us know which process actually executes it.

 

What about the User processes?

Well, I’ve spawned 200 user processes with sqlplus, and got 200 threads:

On the OS side, I’ve registered an additional process to distribute the load of the new user processes. Damn, I start to being confusional using the term “process” o_O

On the session side however, all the user processes are DEDICATED.

 

 A huge side effect

By using the multithreaded execution, the operating system authentication doesn’t work.

Unless Oracle will review it’s authentication mechanism in a future patchset, you’ll need to rely on the password file and use the password to connect to the instance as sysdba, even locally.

What about performance?

In theory, threads should be faster and with a lower footprint:

The main benefit of threads (as compared to multiple processes) is that the context switches are much cheaper than those required to change current processes. Sun reports that a fork() takes 30 times as long as an unbound thread creation and 5 times as long as a boundthread creation.

http://www.princeton.edu/~unix/Solaris/troubleshoot/process.html

and

In some operating systems running on some hardware, switching between threads belonging to the same process is much faster than switching to a thread from different process (because it requires more complicated process context switch).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_switching_latency

In practice, I’ll do some tests and let you know! 🙂

 

What about the good old OS kill command to terminate processes?

Good question! Currently I have not found any references to an orakill command (that exists on Windows). Hope it will arrive soon!

Cheers

Ludo

Oracle Database 12c finally out!! First impressions

After a long, long wait, Oracle finally announced the availability of his new generation database. And looking at the new features, I think it will take several months before I’ll learn them all. The impressive number of changes brings me back to the release 10gR1, and I’m not surprised that Oracle has waited so long, I still bet that we’ll find a huge amount of bugs in the first release. We need for sure to wait a first Patchset, as always, before going production.

Does ‘c’ stand for cloud?

While Oracle has developed this release with the cloud  in mind, the first word that comes out of my mind is “consolidation”. The new claimed feature  Pluggable Database (aka Oracle Multitenancy) will be the dream of every datacenter manager along with CloneDB (well, it was somehow already available on 11.2.0.2) and ASM Thin_provisioned diskgroups.

But yes, it’s definitely the best for clouds

Other features like Flex ASM, Flex Cluster, several new security features, crossplatform backups… let imagine how deeply we can work to make private, multi-tenant clouds.

First steps, what changes with a typical installation

splash

The process for a traditional standalone DB+ASM installation is the same as the old 11gR2: You’ll need to install the Grid Infrastructure first (and then take advantage of the Oracle Restart feature) and subsequently the Database installation.

The installation documentation is complete as always and is getting quite huge as the Grid Infrastructure capabilities increment.

To meet most installation prerequisites, Oracle has prepared again an RPM that does the dirty work:

oracle-rdbms-server-12cR1-preinstall-1.0-3.el6.x86_64.rpm

Oracle suggests to use Ksplice and also explicitly recommends to use the deadline I/O scheduler (it has been longtime a best practice but I can’t remember it was documented officially).

The splash screen has become more “red” giving a colorful experience on the installation process. 😉

Once the GI is installed, the Database installation asks for many new OS groups: OSBACKUPDBA, OSDGDBA, OSKMDBA. This give you more possibilities to split administration duties, not specifying them will lead to the “old behavior”.

new_OSGROUPS

You can decide to use an ACFS filesystem for both the installation AND the database files (with some exceptions, e.g. Windows servers). So, you can take advantage of the snapshot features of ACFS for your data, provided that the performance is acceptable (I’ll try to test and blog more about this). You can use the feature Copy-On-Write to provide writable snapshot copies, directly embedding a special syntax inside the “create pluggable database” command. Unfortunately, Oracle has decided to deliver pluggable databases as an extra-cost option. :-/

The database creation with DBCA is even easier, you have an option for a very default installation, you can guess it uses templates with all options installed by default.

But the Hot topic is that you can create it as a “Container Database”. This is done by appending the keywords “enable pluggable database;” at the end of the create database command. The process will then put all the required bricks (creation of the pdb$seed database and so on), I’ll cover the topic in separate posts cause it’s the really biggest new feature.

dbca_create_as_pluggable

You can still use advanced mode to have the “old style” database creation, where you can customize your database.

If you try to create only the scripts and run them manually (that’s my habit), you’ll notice that SQL scripts are not run directly within the opened SQL*Plus session, but they’re run from a perl script that basically suppresses all the output to terminal, giving the impression of a cleaner installation. IMO it could be better only if everything runs fine.

Finally, I’ll get something familiar, but with a brand new release number! 🙂

Stay tuned, I’ll write soon about some really interesting features of the new Oracle Database 12c!

Cheers

Ludo