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 post is about one of the fundamentally important properties of a database: how IO is done. The test case I studied is doing a simple full table scan of a single large table. In both Oracle and postgres the table doesn’t have any indexes or constraints, which is not a realistic example, but this doesn’t change the principal topic of the study: doing a table scan.

I used a publicly available dataset from the US bureau of transportation statistics called FAF4.5.1_database.zip
The zipped file is 347MB, unzipped size 1.7GB.

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:

For the difference between Oracle database versions 18.8 and 18.9 this too follows the line of a low amount of differences.

As always, there are some parameters that have changed from being undocumented spare to being undocumented with a name.

Also, the DBA and CDB table (DBA|CDB)_REGISTRY_BACKPORTS is back again. The disappearance of this table in 18.8 turned out to be a bug. There is a patch for 18.8 if you need this table.

As expected, there aren’t any really drastic differences between Oracle database version 19.5 and 19.6. Now that I am doing these series on differences for all the versions every quarter the new release updates are coming out, there is a certain line, and this release does follow that.

As always, there are some parameters that have changed from being undocumented spare to being undocumented with a name. There is one documented parameter that was added: optimizer_session_type, which has gone official from “_optimizer_auto_index_allow”; see bug 29632611.

Oracle Universal Installer, or OUI for short, doesn’t at all like it if the hostname resolves to an IP address in the 127.0.0.0/0 range. At best it complains, at worst it starts installing and configuring software only to abort and bury the real cause deep in the logs.

I am a great fan of HashiCorp’s Vagrant as you might have guessed reading some of the previous articles, and as such wanted a scripted solution to changing the hostname to something more sensible before I begin provisioning software. I should probably add that I’m using my own base boxes; the techniques in this post should equally apply to other boxes as well.

This post is about how to use gdb, which is a debugger, so very simplistically put an aid for looking at C programs, as a profiler. I use gdb quite a lot for profiling because it’s the easiest way for profiling for me.

Lots of people which I know use other tools like perf, systemtap and dtrace for the same purpose and that’s fine. Each tools has its own advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage of gdb is that it’s using ptrace to attach to a process, which makes it dead slow from a machine perspective, because everything it then does goes via another process, which is the debugger. That is how the debugger works.

Also lots of people use gdb like I do, and use basic functionality, which is breaking at functions, which makes it possible to find out the sequence of how functions are called, generating backtraces (stack traces) to understand the stack and maybe looking at functions arguments.

The Oracle database log writer is the process that fundamentally influences database change performance. Under normal circumstances the log writer must persist the changes made to the blocks before the actual change is committed. Therefore, it’s vitally important to understand what the log writer is exactly doing. This is widely known by the Oracle database community.

The traditional method for looking at log writer performance is looking at the wait event ‘log file parallel write’ and the CPU time, and comparing that to the ‘log file sync’ alias “commit wait time”. If ‘log file parallel write’ and ‘log file sync’ roughly match, a commit is waiting on the log writer IO latency, if it isn’t then it’s unclear, and things get vague.

This post is about a change in how the time is measured for the event ‘log file parallel write’. This is important for the performance tuning of any change activity in an Oracle database, because with the default commit settings, a foreground session that commits changes waits in the wait event ‘log file sync’, which is a wait on logwriter activity, for which the wait event ‘log file parallel write’ always has been the indicator of the time spend on IO.

Log file sync
First things first: a foreground session normally waits on the wait event ‘log file sync’ when it commits waiting for its change vectors to be written to the online redologfile(s) by the logwriter. It is wrong to always assume a ‘log file sync’ will be present. If, somehow, the logwriter manages to increase the ON DISK SCN to or beyond the foreground session’s commit SCN, there will be no ‘log file sync’ wait event.