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