Internals

This blogpost is about how the oracle database executable created or changed during installation and patching. I take linux for the examples, because that is the version that I am almost uniquely working with. I think the linux operating is where the vast majority of linux installations are installed on, and therefore an explanation with linux is helpful to most of the people.

The first thing to understand is the oracle executable is a dynamically linked executable. This is easy to see when you execute the ‘ldd’ utility against the oracle executable:

This blogpost takes a look at the technical differences between Oracle database 12.2.0.1 PSU 200714 (july 2020) and PSU 201020 (october 2020). This gives technical specialists an idea of the differences, and gives them the ability to assess if the PSU impacts anything.

Functions

This blogpost takes a look at the technical differences between Oracle database 18 RU 11 (july 2020) and RU 12 (october 2020). This gives technical specialists an idea of the differences, and gives them the ability to assess if the RU impacts anything.

Functions

This blogpost takes a look at the technical differences between Oracle database 19 RU 8 (july 2020) and RU 9 (october 2020). This gives technical specialists an idea of the differences, and gives them the ability to assess if the RU impacts anything.

Functions

This post is about library cache SQL cursors, and how these are managed by the database instance.

This post is the result of a question that I got after presenting a session about Oracle database mutexes organised by ITOUG, as a response to the conference cancellations because of COVID-19. Thank Gianni Ceresa for asking me!

The library cache provides shared cursors and execution plans. Because they are shared, sessions can take advantage of the work of previous sessions of creating these. However, by having these shared, access needs to be regulated not to have sessions overwrite each other’s work. This is done by mutexes.

The question I got was (this is a paraphrased from my memory): ‘when using pluggable databases, could a session in one pluggable database influence performance of a session in another pluggable database’?

This blogpost is about the Oracle database row or dictionary cache. This is a separate cache that caches database metadata, like database object properties or user properties.

There is surprising little in-depth technical detail about the row cache. To some degree I understand: issues with the row cache are rare.

I noticed a column in V$ROWCACHE called ‘FASTGETS’. Whatever FASTGETS means, in my database it is being used:

In my previous post I described a case of "enq: TX – row lock contention" that was actually a network latency problem.

More and more those kinds of problems (it seems like history happens all over again) caused my friend (Radosław Kut) and me to write a simple tool to analyze SQL performance from a network perspective.

We called this tool STADO (SQL Tracefile Analyzer Designed for Oracle). It parses a tcpdump outout from application server to identify the longest running queries from application and network perspective.

For now it can show you:

For the difference between Oracle database versions 12.2.0.1.191015 and 12.2.0.1.200114 this too follows the line of a low amount of differences.

There have been two spare parameters that have been changed to named undocumented parameters, and no data dictionary changes.

parameters unique in version 12.2.0.1.191015 versus 12.2.0.1.200114

NAME
--------------------------------------------------
_fifth_spare_parameter
_one-hundred-and-forty-eighth_spare_parameter

parameters unique in version 12.2.0.1.200114 versus 12.2.0.1.191015

NAME
--------------------------------------------------
_bug29825525_bct_public_dba_buffer_dynresize_delay
_enable_ptime_update_for_sys

On the C function side, there have been a group of AWR functions that have been removed and a group of SGA management functions, among other functions. There functions that have been added are random and diverse.

This post was created when trying to understand how the Oracle executable works. Specifically the logwriter, which, if it is posted by a process, which is done using semop(), signals that process back using semop() if the logwriter happens to be in post/wait mode, and is not using the ‘scalable logwriter mode’, which means it is not using additional worker processes.

To be more specific, I tried investigating something that is not Oracle specific, but specific to the usage of semaphores on linux with an executable for which you do not have the source code and is not compiled with debugging symbols.

I attached to the process using gdb, and put a break on semop: