Kevin Closson’s Oracle Blog: Platform, Storage & Clustering Topics Related to Oracle Databases

Since I’m on site at a Beta customer (testing the product I work on at Oracle), this will be a quick blog entry. I’ve been meaning to direct folks to Gear6 for quite some time now. I have no stake in Gear6, so this is not a shameless plug. I think they solve interesting problems so if you are a large NFS shop, I’d recommend checking them out. They offer a plug-in NFS read-through cache and while I haven’t had first hand experience with their product, I know folks that have and they had good things to say about Gear6.

If any of you are confused about what NFS has to do with Oracle, I recommend this list of Oracle on NFS related posts.

Quite some time back I made a blog entry about deploying Oracle Clusterware for non-RAC purposes. As I pointed out in that entry, there were license ramifications. That was then, this is now.

In this press release about Oracle Clusterware, Oracle is announcing that Oracle Enterprise Linux (with Unbreakable Linux Support) can deploy Oracle Clusterware to provide high availability services for any purpose they so desire.

Now that, is interesting.

Some additional, related links:

Making Applications Highly Available Using Oracle Clusterware

Oracle Clusterware API

Considerations for “Stretch Clusters” with Oracle Real Application Clusters

No worries, we won’t have to lower the Cone of Silence. True, you will see use of an “underbar” init.ora parameter in this post, but its use is not the central theme. No, no Silver Bullets here. This is another post in the Little Things Doth Crabby Make series.

I routinely brag about the sophistication level of my blog readers, so, folks, don’t let me down. Let’s start a thread about why the contents of the following session output would make my Little Things list. OK, come on…

SQL> set timing on
SQL>
SQL> alter session set "_parallel_broadcast_enabled" = FALSE
  2
SQL> select count(*) from ap_ae_lines_all where AE_LINE_ID > 1397437860 ;

  COUNT(*)
----------
         0

Elapsed: 00:01:21.70
SQL>
SQL> alter session set "_parallel_broadcast_enabled" = FALSE;

Session altered.

Elapsed: 00:00:00.00
SQL>
SQL> select count(*) from ap_ae_lines_all where AE_LINE_ID > 1397437860 ;

  COUNT(*)
----------
         0

Elapsed: 00:01:30.46

But my, oh my, how I’ve tried. OK, I guess my new name is Fan Boy. I know for a fact that I’ve been pretty relentless on this particular server for over 100 days of its current 215-day life.

-sh-3.00$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 3)

-sh-3.00$ uptime
 14:41:17 up 215 days, 14:32, 15 users,  load average: 37.85, 37.48, 25.89

And, top(1):

  top - 14:40:44 up 215 days, 14:31, 15 users,  load average: 40.91, 38.05, 25.62
Tasks: 309 total,  30 running, 278 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu0  : 92.8% us,  7.2% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Cpu1  : 90.1% us,  9.9% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Cpu2  : 89.3% us,  9.8% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.9% hi,  0.0% si
Cpu3  : 90.1% us,  9.9% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Cpu4  : 89.2% us,  9.9% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.9% hi,  0.0% si
Cpu5  : 89.1% us, 10.9% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Cpu6  : 92.8% us,  7.2% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Cpu7  : 93.7% us,  6.3% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:  10393736k total,  9347616k used,  1046120k free,     1892k buffers
Swap: 10288440k total,   838236k used,  9450204k free,  6264396k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
14919 kclosson  15   0  120m  84m 7076 S 30.3  0.8   0:17.67 sqlldr
14942 kclosson  15   0  119m  84m 7068 S 29.4  0.8   0:17.75 sqlldr
14940 kclosson  15   0  120m  84m 7068 S 28.6  0.8   0:16.21 sqlldr
15008 kclosson  16   0  668m  35m  29m R 28.6  0.3   0:16.48 oracle
14924 kclosson  15   0  119m  84m 7076 R 26.8  0.8   0:16.39 sqlldr
14932 kclosson  16   0  120m  84m 7068 R 26.8  0.8   0:17.07 sqlldr
14959 kclosson  15   0  668m  34m  29m S 25.9  0.3   0:15.96 oracle
14961 kclosson  16   0  668m  34m  29m R 25.9  0.3   0:14.90 oracle
14945 kclosson  15   0  119m  84m 7076 S 25.0  0.8   0:16.07 sqlldr
14980 kclosson  15   0  668m  34m  29m S 25.0  0.3   0:15.09 oracle
14935 kclosson  16   0  119m  84m 7068 S 24.1  0.8   0:15.05 sqlldr
14947 kclosson  16   0  119m  84m 7072 R 24.1  0.8   0:15.90 sqlldr
14943 kclosson  15   0  119m  84m 7076 R 23.2  0.8   0:14.75 sqlldr
14938 kclosson  16   0  120m  84m 7068 S 22.3  0.8   0:14.35 sqlldr
14941 kclosson  15   0  119m  84m 7076 R 22.3  0.8   0:15.96 sqlldr
14951 kclosson  15   0  120m  84m 7068 S 22.3  0.8   0:16.96 sqlldr
14921 kclosson  16   0  120m  84m 7068 R 21.4  0.8   0:17.84 sqlldr
14934 kclosson  15   0  120m  84m 7076 S 21.4  0.8   0:16.13 sqlldr
14929 kclosson  15   0  119m  84m 7076 R 20.5  0.8   0:17.70 sqlldr
14950 kclosson  16   0  119m  84m 7068 R 20.5  0.8   0:13.63 sqlldr
14922 kclosson  15   0  120m  84m 7068 S 19.6  0.8   0:17.40 sqlldr
14977 kclosson  15   0  668m  34m  29m R 18.7  0.3   0:16.38 oracle
15002 kclosson  16   0  668m  34m  29m R 18.7  0.3   0:15.00 oracle
14920 kclosson  16   0  119m  84m 7076 R 17.8  0.8   0:17.97 sqlldr
14923 kclosson  16   0  119m  84m 7068 R 17.0  0.8   0:13.44 sqlldr
14925 kclosson  16   0  120m  84m 7068 S 17.0  0.8   0:13.06 sqlldr
14927 kclosson  16   0  119m  84m 7076 R 17.0  0.8   0:15.05 sqlldr
14931 kclosson  16   0  119m  84m 7076 R 17.0  0.8   0:15.18 sqlldr
14957 kclosson  15   0  668m  34m  28m S 17.0  0.3   0:14.16 oracle
14930 kclosson  16   0  120m  84m 7068 R 16.1  0.8   0:15.31 sqlldr
14986 kclosson  15   0  668m  34m  29m R 16.1  0.3   0:14.37 oracle
14936 kclosson  15   0  119m  84m 7068 S 15.2  0.8   0:15.58 sqlldr
14964 kclosson  15   0  668m  34m  29m S 15.2  0.3   0:17.10 oracle
15014 kclosson  15   0  668m  34m  28m S 12.5  0.3   0:12.83 oracle
14949 kclosson  16   0  120m  84m 7076 S  7.1  0.8   0:15.70 sqlldr
14955 kclosson  16   0  666m  35m  31m R  4.5  0.4   0:03.11 oracle
14966 kclosson  16   0  666m  35m  31m R  4.5  0.3   0:02.80 oracle
14998 kclosson  15   0  666m  35m  31m S  4.5  0.3   0:02.68 oracle

There are 120 spindles downwind of this….drumroll please….

$ asmcmd
ASMCMD> ls
SDATA1/
SDATA2_1/
SDATA2_2/
SDATA2_3/
ASMCMD> rm -fr *
ASMCMD>

Eek!

In other news, I just learned that Greg Rahn is about to get his hands on a set of HP DL580 G5 (Tigerton goodies). I’d sure like to get Silly Little Benchmark numbers from that sweetheart of a system…wish in one hand, you-know-what in the other I suppose.