Internals

I was asked some time ago what the Oracle database event ‘TCP socket (KGAS)’ means. This blogpost is a deep dive into what this event times in Oracle database 12.1.0.2.180717.

This event is not normally seen, only when TCP connections are initiated from the database using packages like UTL_TCP, UTL_SMTP and the one used in this article, UTL_HTTP.

A very basic explanation is this event times the time that a database foreground session spends on TCP connection management and communicating over TCP, excluding client and database link (sqlnet) networking. If you trace the system calls, you see that mostly that is working with a (network) socket. Part of the code in the oracle database that is managing that, sits in the kernel code layer kgas, kernel generic (of which I am quite sure, and then my guess:) asynchronous services, which explains the naming of the event.

Starting from Oracle 12, in a default configured database, there are more log writer processes than the well known ‘LGWR’ process itself, which are the ‘LGnn’ processes:

$ ps -ef | grep test | grep lg
oracle   18048     1  0 12:50 ?        00:00:13 ora_lgwr_test
oracle   18052     1  0 12:50 ?        00:00:06 ora_lg00_test
oracle   18056     1  0 12:50 ?        00:00:00 ora_lg01_test

These are the log writer worker processes, for which the minimal amount is equal to the amount public redo strands. Worker processes are assigned to a group, and the group is assigned to a public redo strand. The amount of worker processes in the group is dependent on the undocumented parameter “_max_log_write_parallelism”, which is one by default.

I gotten some requests to provide an overview of the redo series of blogposts I am currently running. Here it is:

The redo series would not be complete without writing about changing the behaviour of commit. There are two ways to change commit behaviour:

1. Changing waiting for the logwriter to get notified that the generated redo is persisted. The default is ‘wait’. This can be set to ‘nowait’.
2. Changing the way the logwriter handles generated redo. The default is ‘immediate’. This can be set to ‘batch’.

There are actually three ways these changes can be made:
1. As argument of the commit statement: ‘commit’ can be written as ‘commit write wait immediate’ (statement level).
2. As a system level setting. By omitting an explicit commit mode when executing the commit command, the setting as set with the parameters commit_wait (default: wait) and commit_logging (default: immediate).
3. As a session level setting. By omitting an explicit commit mode, but by setting either commit_wait or commit_logging it overrides the settings at the system level.

During the investigations of my previous blogpost about what happens during a commit and when the data becomes available, I used breaks in gdb (GNU debugger) at various places of the execution of an insert and a commit to see what is visible for other sessions during the various stages of execution of the commit.

However, I did find something else, which is very logical, but is easily overlooked: at certain moments access to the table is blocked/serialised in order to let a session make changes to blocks belonging to the table, or peripheral blocks like undo, for the sake of consistency. These are changes made at the physical layer of an Oracle segment, the logical model of Oracle says that writers don’t block readers.

The previous blogpost talked about a simple insert, this blogpost investigates what happens when the DML is committed. Of course this is done with regular commit settings, which means means they are not touched, which means commit_logging is set to immediate and commit_wait is set to wait as far as I know. The documentation says there is no default value, and the settings are empty in all parameter views. In my humble opinion, if you must change the commit settings in order to make your application perform usable with the database, something is severely wrong somewhere.

This blogpost works best if you thoroughly gone through the previous post. I admit it’s a bit dry and theoretical, but you will appreciate the knowledge which you gained there, because it directly applies to a commit.

First let’s look at the flow of functions for the commit:

This blogpost looks at the very start of oracle redo: the generation of it. In order to do that, I start off with a very simple table, and look at the redo generation part. I guess the regular readers of this blogpost series understand that redo generation is closely connected with making changes made to blocks. This post therefore is not only about redo generation, but also about how the technical implementation of block changes.

I created a simple table (create table test (f1 varchar2(10)) with no index to make the execution as simple as possible, and simply insert rows (insert into test values (‘a’)). It could be argued that not having an index makes it not the most real life scenario, and this might be right. However, the goal here is to make the execution as simple as possible.

I then looked at the execution of the SQL, and created an overview of the relevant functions that are executed in my session:

This is the seventh part of a blog series about oracle redo.

Adaptive log file sync is a feature that probably came with Oracle version 11.2. Probably means I looked at the undocumented parameters of Oracle version 11.1 and do not see any of the ‘_adaptive_log_file_sync*’ parameters. It was actually turned off by default with versions 11.2.0.1 and 11.2.0.2, and was turned on by default since version 11.2.0.3.

During investigating how Oracle works with regards to waiting, I discovered an oddity. I was researching for my redo blog posts, and found that in a certain case, Oracle uses the ‘nanosleep’ system call. As the name of this system call suggests, this call allows you to let a process sleep with nanosecond precision.

The oddity that I found, was the following:

This is the sixth part in a blog series about Oracle database redo. The previous posts provided information about the log writer writing, this post is about the process that is waiting after issuing commit for the log writer to write it’s redo from the public redo strand. When the database is using post/wait for process commits, the committing process follows the following (simplified) procedure: