oracle

Easy and Free X-Windowing Setup with Cygwin

Today I had to carry out Oracle client Installation on one of the server. Normally I use vncviewer to connect to one of my Linux machine (having vncserver setup) and then get the display on to that machine.

But my colleague suggested me about one more approach, which I thought of sharing with all of you. This is using a X –Windowing software which is Free 🙂 Surprised!!

This can be done using Cygwin which is a freeware so you can trash your Reflection X or Hummingbird Installations. You can check various X-Windows software available here

Lets come back to Cygwin. You can download the software from http://x.cygwin.com/

To perform the Cygwin setup, you need to follow below steps

1) Start the XWindows server on your PC. This could be done by running startxwin-multiwindow file present on Desktop (Created during installation) or running /usr/X11R6/bin/startxwin.sh from cygwin

$ sh /usr/X11R6/bin/startxwin.sh

You can also use startx. For configuration check this link

http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ug/using.html

3) Connect to the Unix/Linux machine and set the display to your machine. Use ipconfig command to get the IP address for your machine. E.g

C:\Documents and Settings\amit &gt;ipconfig
Windows IP Configuration
Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:
        Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : xyz.com
        IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : <strong>192.168.4.47</strong>
        Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : X.X.X.X
        Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : X.X.X.X

Now set the DISPLAY variable as

$export DISPLAY=192.168.4.47:0.0

4) Test it by typing any application like xcalc,xclock,etc.

If X11 Forwarding is enabled on the remote machine, you can also directly login to server using ssh

$ssh oracle@ip –X

Now you can carry out oracle Installation using runInstaller 🙂

5 June, 2008 by Amit Bansal Unix 2

Adding new ASM disk to RAC database fails

Many times i came across a common problem in RAC databases where trying to add an asm disk is not possible due to errors like

ORA-15075 “disk(s) are not visible cluster-wide”

ORA-15020 “discovered duplicate ASM disk “DISK1” and

ORA-15054 “disk “ORCL:DISK1” does not exist in diskgroup “DG1”.

Rebalancing the diskgroup and trying to add the disk with “FORCE” option also does not help in this case.

I will be discussing how to come out of a situation like this i.e When you are trying to add an asm disk in cluster environment and it says that disk is already added and when trying to drop the same disk it says that disk is not present in the diskgroup.

Lets start from the very begining:
I have decided to add an asm disk in RAC environment to an already existing diskgroup DATA1.

But it failed with following error:

ALTER DISKGROUP DATA1 ADD DISK '/dev/rdsk/c1t2d3s4';*
ERROR at line 1:
<strong>ORA-15032: not all alterations performed
ORA-15075: disk(s) are not visible cluster-wide</strong>

This is due to the fact that the physical disk partition is not visible from all RAC nodes. Then i contacted the sysadmins to make sure that the disk is visible from all RAC nodes and accessible by ORACLE. They have fixed the problem and now the disk /dev/rdsk/c1t2d3s4 can be seen from all RAC nodes. Then i tried to add the disk again using force option as:

SQL > ALTER DISKGROUP DATA1 ADD DISK ‘/dev/rdsk/c1t2d3s4’ force;
But it failed with following error:

ORA-15020: discovered duplicate ASM disk “/dev/rdsk/c1t2d3s4”

It shows that disk with same name is already present in the diskgroup.

As it shows that the disk is already present in the diskgroup, while trying to drop the disk i got following error:

SQL&gt; alter diskgroup DATA1 drop disk '/dev/rdsk/c1t2d3s4';
alter diskgroup DATA1 drop disk '/dev/rdsk/c1t2d3s4'
*
ERROR at line 1:
<strong>ORA-15032 : not all alterations performed
ORA-15054 : disk "/dev/rdsk/c1t2d3s4" does not exist in diskgroup "DATA1"</strong>

Now I cannot move further as adding and dropping the disk is not possible here. Then I decided to check the status of the disk from v$asm_disk from all RAC nodes, to do this issue following query:

SQL > col name format a15
SQL > col path format a20
SQL > select GROUP_NUMBER,DISK_NUMBER,MOUNT_STATUS,HEADER_STATUS,NAME,PATH from v$asm_disk;

We Obain following results from all the nodes :

G# D# HEADER_STATU MOUNT_S STATE NAME PATH
—- —- ———— ——- ——– ———— ————————-
0 0 MEMBER IGNORED NORMAL /dev/rdsk/c1t2d3s4

Header_status=MEMBER means that the disk is a valid asm disk on all RAC nodes.
Mount_status=IGNORED means that Disk is present in the system, but is ignored by ASM.

Group_number=0 This is the number used when a disk is not mounted by a diskgroup.

Now by checking the dd output of the disk as :

$dd if=/dev/rdsk/c1t2d3s4 of=/tmp/disk.out bs=4096 count=1096

$ vi /tmp/disk.out

I found that the diskgroup name and disk number allocated to this disk, which confirms that the disk is now a part of diskgroup DATA1.

But from the results of the header_status,mount_status and group_number it is clear that the disk is partially added to RAC asm instances. To correct this we will have to clear the disk header to add it again:

# dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/rdsk/c1t2d3s4 bs=4096 count=5000

This command cleared the disk header and after that disk was added successfully.

Note: – Please note that using dd will clear the ASM header and should be used only after confirming the disk. Using it on a wrong disk can cause Diskgroup to dismount and lead to Data Loss.

1 June, 2008 by Saurabh Sood 10g 14

Transparent Application Failover – TAF

Transparent Application Failover (TAF) is a client-side feature that allows for clients to reconnect to surviving databases in the event of a failure of a database instance.

Note that this is not used for purpose of load balancing or for Connect Time Failover.

TAF operates in two modes

– Session Failover which will recreate lost connections and sessions

– Select Failover which will replay queries that were in progress. It will discard the old rows which have been fetched earlier and will fetch the rest of rows.

TAF can be implemented at

– Client Side

– Server Side

Client Side

This can be done by creating a entry in tnsnames.ora as follows

TESTDB10_basic=
(DESCRIPTION=
<strong>(LOAD_BALANCE=on)
 (FAILOVER=on) </strong>
(ADDRESS= (PROTOCOL=tcp) HOST=prod01-vip)(PORT=1521))
(ADDRESS= (PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST= prod02-vip)PORT=1521))
(CONNECT_DATA=
 (SERVICE_NAME=TESTDB10)
<strong>(FAILOVER_MODE= (TYPE=select)
(METHOD=basic</strong>))))

Here FAILOVER_MODE parameter is used to implement TAF.

Above configuration is for connections which will allow new connections to be created at failover time. This is determined by parameter METHOD which is set to BASIC here.

You can also have a session established before. This helps as new connection can take time and will thus result in faster failover. To do this use

TESTDB_prod01=
(DESCRIPTION=
(LOAD_BALANCE=on)
(FAILOVER=on)
(ADDRESS= (PROTOCOL=tcp) HOST=prod01-vip)(PORT=1521))
(CONNECT_DATA=
(SERVICE_NAME=TESTDB)
(INSTANCE_NAME=TESTDB1)
(FAILOVER_MODE= <strong>(BACKUP= TESTDB_prod02)
(TYPE=select) (METHOD=PRECONNECT)</strong>)))

 TESTDB_prod02=
(DESCRIPTION=
(LOAD_BALANCE=on)
 (FAILOVER=on)
 (ADDRESS= (PROTOCOL=tcp) HOST=prod01-vip)(PORT=1521))
 (CONNECT_DATA=
 (SERVICE_NAME=TESTDB10)
(INSTANCE_NAME=TESTDB2)
 (FAILOVER_MODE=
 <strong>(BACKUP= TESTDB_prod01)
(TYPE=select)
(METHOD=PRECONNECT)</strong>)))

Following query can be used to monitor information about failed over sessions

SELECT MACHINE, FAILOVER_TYPE, FAILOVER_METHOD, FAILED_OVER, COUNT(*)
FROM V$SESSION GROUP BY MACHINE, FAILOVER_TYPE, FAILOVER_METHOD, FAILED_OVER;

Server Side Configuration

This can be done using server-side service attributes. Please note that in case both (Client side and server side) configuration are used then service-side settings will be used.

You can refer to following note for details

Note 404644.1 – Configuration of Transparent Application Failover(TAF) works with server side service

Features of TAF

– Sessions executing any insert/update/delete statement fail then statement will be rollback.

– A command which has been successfully completed upon failure and has changed the database state, then TAF does not resend the command.

– When using select failover, we will retrieve only the rows which have not been fetched by earlier sessions.

1 June, 2008 by Amit Bansal 10g 5

Resolving Shutdown Immediate Hang Situations

Many times Oracle DBA’s are faced with a situation where shutting down the instance with shutdown immediate seems to take infinite time and gives a impression that the session is hung. In most of the cases this is not a hang. Hang can be defined as a scenario when few sessions/processes are waiting on some action and in turn blocking other session/processes to complete their tasks. Now the original sessions could be waiting because of resource issues or Oracle Bugs.

Shutdown immediate can take long time to complete (appear to be hung) because of three reasons:

1. Uncommitted transactions are being rolled back.

2. SMON is cleaning temp segments or performing delayed block cleanouts.

3. Processes still continue to be connected to the database and do not terminate.

1. Uncommitted transactions are being rolled back:

This is the case when the message ‘Waiting for smon to disable tx recovery’ is posted in the alert log after we issue shutdown immediate.

There are two reasons for this:
– A large query was running at the time of shutdown immediate.
-A large transaction was running at the time of shutdown immediate.

For large queries:

SQL > select count(*) from v$session_longops where time_remaining>0;

If it returns a value > 0 then we can do a shutdown abort and then startup restrict and then again shutdown immediate.

For large transactions:

SQL > select sum(used_ublk) from v$transaction;

If it returns a large value then we have to wait for a long time for shutdowm to get completed.
If the large transaction is aborted and then shutdown is issued then we have to query v$fast_start_transactions and v$fast_start_server, we will not see anything in v$transaction at this time.

At this particular moment transaction recovery is going on and the count(*) will keep on decreasing:

SQL > select count(*) from v$fast_start_transaction;

Decreasing count will show that recovery is going on and when the recovery is completed the database will be shutdown.

But it is not desirable under some circumstances such as, when we have very short maintance window and we need to perform a shutdown immediate to do some work, in those cases we can use the following event and set in the init.ora file TEMPERORARLY To disable transaction recovery:

event=”10513 trace name context forever, level 2″

and bounce the instance and issue shutdown immediate to get complete without transaction recovery.SMON will not do a transaction recovery untill this event is set in the init.ora file so it is necessary to remove this event whenever you get a chance to shutdown the database again, this time shutdown immediate can even take 3-5 hours(Just remove this event from pfile).

2. SMON is cleaning temp segments or performing delayed block cleanouts:

During a SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE and SHUTDOWN NORMAL, SMON cleans up extents which are no longer needed and marking them as freed. It means that count from uet$ will decrease and count in fet$ will increase.

To verify that the temporary segments are decreasing have an active session available in SQL during the SHUTDOWN IMMEDIATE. Run query to ensure the database is not hanging, but is actually perform extent cleanup:

SQL> select count(block#) from fet$;
COUNT(BLOCK)
----------
115

SQL> select count(block#) from uet$;
COUNT(BLOCK)
----------
713

After some time, issue the query again and check the results:

SQL> select count(block#) from fet$;
COUNT(BLOCK)
----------
210

SQL > select count(block#) from uet$;
COUNT(BLOCK)
----------
512

If you do not have sufficient time to wait for this cleanup then you can set the following event and bounce the database and reissue shutdown immediate to skip this cleanup:

event=”10061 trace name context forever, level 10″

It allows you to prevent SMON from cleaning up temporary segments. Again it is not recommended to set this event event forever. Whenever you have large downtime remove this event and allow SMON to do its work.

3. Processes still continue to be connected to the database and do not terminate:

After issuing shutdown immediate, If we see entries in alert log file as:

Tue Jan  8 12:00:27 2008
Active call for process 10071 user 'oracle' program '[email protected] (J001)'
SHUTDOWN: waiting for active calls to complete.
Tue Jan  8 12:00:57 2008

SHUTDOWN: Active sessions prevent database close operation

It shows that there are some active calls at program ‘[email protected] (J001)’ which pmon is not able to clear up.This message is due to the fact that database is waiting for pmon to clean up processes, but pmon is unable to clean them. The client connections to the server are causing the shutdown immediate or normal to hang. Do the following in this case:

1. Before shutdown immediate, shutdown the listener:

$ lsnrctl stop

2. Now check if there are any connection present at the database as:

$ ps -eaf | grep LOCAL

It will give you the OSPIDs of the client connected to database.

3 Manually kill them as:

# Kill -9 <OSPID>

4. Issue shutdown immediate now.

Do not forget to bring up the listener after startup 🙂

In addition to this you can set 10046 event in the session used to shutdown the instance. This will help to tell the event on which session is waiting

SQL>alter session set events '10046 trace name context forever, level 12'

SQL>Shutdown immediate;

Look for the trace file in user_dump_dest location. Also look at the alert.log for any other messages. They might be helpful in case the shutdown is experiencing hang situation.

26 May, 2008 by Saurabh Sood Featured 7

Solving ORA-1031 while connecting as “/ as sysdba” :

Many times we see an issue like this:

SQL> conn / as sysdba
ERROR:
ORA-01031: insufficient privileges

This is a very common and frequent error that can occur after the new oracle software install
or due to some permissions changes at OS level.

I will dicuss the approach to solve ORA-1031 error on UNIX environment.

1. Check that oracle_sid and oracle_home are set correctly as:

$ echo $ORACLE_SID
$ echo $ORACLE_HOME

Find the values returned by above command and match these values under /etc/oratab file, these
have to be listed there.

EXAMPLE:
========

$ echo $ORACLE_SID
BSNL

$ echo $ORACLE_HOME
/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_2

$ cat /etc/oratab

BSNL:/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_2:N
VSNL:/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_2:N

The values above are matching with /etc/oratab entries

If the oracle_sid and oracle_home are not set properly then set it as:

$ export ORACLE_SID=BSNL
$ export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_2

And try to connect as “/ as sysdba” It should work now.

If these are correct but still the error is coming then move to step 2.

2. Ensure TWO_TASK is not set

$ echo $TWO_TASK

If it return any lines as:

TWO_TASK=
OR
TWO_TASK=<some_db_name>

Then unset the environment variable as:

$ unset TWO_TASK

Now try to connect as “/ as sysdba”

If these are correct but still the error is coming then move to step 3.

3.Check the permissions on the oracle executable file:

$ cd $ORACLE_HOME/bin
$ ls -la oracle

It should show the following permissions:

-rwsr-s–x 1 oracle oinstall 96725724 Apr 2 13:43 oracle

If its not the same then issue the following command to set the correct permissions:

$ chmod 6751 oracle

If these are correct but still the error is coming then move to step 4.

4. Check for the dba group at OS level. We need to make sure that Operating System users issuing / as sysdba belongs to dba group at OS level.

There is one file we need to check for this i.e $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib/config.s OR $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib/config.c (File name vary from OS to OS on some OS it is config.c and on some OS it is config.s). The value in these file is typically set to “dba” as:

.ascii “dba”

Look for the gid value here.(usdba)
The gid value is usdba so we need to modify the config.c or config.s so that it should look like:
.ascii “usdba”

After making changes to config file relink oracle binaries as:

– Make sure that no oracle processes running
– Login as oracle
– Make sure LD_LIBRARY_PATH and ORACLE_HOME are set properly
$ORACLE_HOME/bin/relink all

If these are correct but still the error is coming then move to step 5.

5. Make sure that dba group at OS level only exists once in /etc/group file and that the users belonging to the dba group are properly comma separated.

Example:

usdba::123:oracle,oracle1

ii) Check that the oracle user uid and gid are same in /etc/group and /etc/passwd

If all these 5 settings are correct and still ora-1031 is coming then the only option is to take truss output and check while opening which file the error is coming.
e.g.

$ truss -aefo /tmp/truss.out sqlplus “/ as sysdba”

6. Ensure you are invoking sqlplus from correct ORACLE_HOME

This actually came as comment on this post and I would agree. Ensure that you are using sqlplus from correct ORACLE_HOME. To do this set

export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin

You can confirm the home using which sqlplus command

24 May, 2008 by Saurabh Sood 10g 11g 18

AWE -What is It and How to use it?

32-bit Operating systems provide 4Gb of addressable space to applications. This includes memory for the user application and also for the system.

When running Oracle on 32-Bit Windows, we can have total memory limited to 1.7 Gb only. If you allocate memory more then 1.7 GB or if it increases during course of database operation, then you are likely to encounter errors such as ORA – 4030, ORA – 12500 or ORA – 27102.

There are few solutions to overcome this problem. I am going to discuss them in this post. Feel free to post any Questions/doubts you have.

1)Using /3GB switch

To increase the virtual addressable space for processes and applications, you need to use /3GB switch. The /3GB switch allows for providing memory upto 3GB for processes (In actual it is nearly 2.7 GB for Oracle) by reducing memory available to OS to 1 GB.
To implement it, you need to modify the boot.ini as follows and restart the server

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="????" /3GB

Note: -“????” in the above example can be the programmatic name of any of the following operating system versions:

– Windows XP Professional

– Windows Server 2003

– Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition

– Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition

– Windows 2000 Advanced Server

– Windows 2000 Datacenter Server

– Windows NT Server 4.0, Enterprise Edition

2)Using /PAE switch

Physical Address Extention (PAE) allows applications to have virtual addressable space beyond 4GB. PAE maps up to 64 GB of physical memory into a 32-bit (4 GB) virtual address space using either 4-KB or 2-MB pages.

This can be enabled using /PAE switch in boot.ini as follows

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="????" <strong>/PAE</strong>

<span style="font-family: Arial;">
</span>

Note: -“????” in the above example can be the programmatic name of any of the following operating system versions:

– Windows 2000 Datacenter Server

– Windows 2000 Advanced Server

– Windows 2003 Data Center Edition (32-Bit)

– Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition (32-Bit)

PAE is also known by name Address Windowing Extensions (AWE). This basically allows Oracle to have larger buffer cache. In addition to addition to boot.ini, you need to make some changes at database level also

1) Add parameter USE_INDIRECT_DATA_BUFFERS=TRUE to spfile/pfile

2) Remove DB_CACHE_SIZE parameter from pfile/spfile and replace it with DB_BLOCK_BUFFERS. To calculate it you need to use following DB_CACHE_SIZE/DB_BLOCK_SIZE

How PAE/AWE works?

PAE allows the system to expand the number of bits that can be used to address physical memory from 32 bits to 36 bits. Out of 1.7GB allocated to Oracle, 1 GB is allocated to a “WINDOW” which is used to map the buffer cache and allows for bigger SGA. This acts like a “Swap Area” where all the blocks are mapped into this window and then provided to the application.It is advisable to use /3GB switch along with /PAE switch so that addressable space is around 2.7GB.

To do it, change boot.ini to as follows

<span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Arial;">multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="????" <strong>/3GB /PAE</strong></span>

Note: – Using both /3GB and /PAE will limit memory addressability to 16 GB. In case you wish to address memory beyond 16GB, you will be required to unset /3GB switch.

AWE Window is specified by parameter AWE_WINDOW_SIZE. The size of this window is defined by a registry setting in the HOME key for Oracle (HKLM\Software\Oracle\Homex) called AWE_WINDOW_SIZE. Default value for AWE_WINDOW_SIZE is 1 GB and no entry in registry will mean that it is running at default value. Value for this parameter has to be specified in Bytes in registry.

Metalink Note:225349.1 and Oracle Docs mentions that you need to use AWE_WINDOW_MEMORY whereas Microsoft site mentions using AWE_WINDOW_SIZE in registry.

This 3GB space will be used by following components:

– The Value for AWE_WINDOW_SIZE- SGA (excluding Buffer Cache)- Overhead for Oracle.exe and DLL’s -Stack space for all threads (Defaults to 1MB/thread, unless orastack is used)- PGA and UGA memory for all user sessions

To understand it, lets take an example. Suppose we need to set memory for a new system using /3GB and /PAE

Out of 2.7GB of addressable space, 1 GB will be used for AW_WINDOW_SIZE. We are left with 1.7 GB which has to be used for SGA shared_pool_size + large_pool_size + java_pool_size + log_buffers +steams_pool_size)

**Please Note that you can not use ASMM i.e SGA_TARGET when using AWE.

AWE_WINDOW_SIZE can be decreased from 1GB to a lower value. This has to be calculated and set judiciously as a lower value can increase mapping/unmapping activity and can also lead to CPU Spinning. Please refer below note for details on calculating minimum AWE_WINDOW_SIZE parameter

Note:225349.1 – Implementing Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) or VLM on Windows Platforms

Other ways of reducing Memory usage

1) Use MTS (Shared Server Configuration) as this will reduce the number of processes and ultimately reducing memory usage.

2) Reduce value for *area_size parameter’s (if using Manual PGA management)

3) You can also use orastack to reduce the memory usage per thread (which defaults to 1 MB)

cmd>orastack oracle.exe 700000

cmd>orastack tnslsnr.exe 700000

cmd>orastack svrmgrl.exe 700000

cmd>orastack sqlplus.exe 700000

This sets the value to 700KB beyond which it is risky to decrease the value.

Issues with AWE

1) To use AWE we need to use DB_BLOCK_BUFFERS parameter. As we cannot have DB_BLOCK_BUFFERS and DB_CACHE_SIZE parameter being used simultaneouly , we need to unset DB_CACHE_SIZE parameter. This will mean that you cannot use Automatic Shared Memory Management (ASMM) with AWE i.e You have to unset SGA_TARGET parameter. Similarly you cannot use MEMORY_TARGET (11g ) parameter with AWE. Failure to do so will lead to

ORA-00825: cannot set DB_BLOCK_BUFFERS if SGA_TARGET or MEMORY_TARGET is set

Cause: SGA_TARGET or MEMORY_TARGET set with DB_BLOCK_BUFFERS set.

Action: Do not set SGA_TARGET, MEMORY_TARGET or use new cache parameters, and do not use DB_BLOCK_BUFFERS which is an old cache parameter.

2) Setting Low value for AWE_WINDOW_SIZE can lead to CPU spin issues.

3) Applications doing large amount of I/O will see Performance impact due to Paging.

4) Due to use of AWE, additional Overhead is introduced.

5) Memory beyond 4GB can only be used for Buffer Cache. So In case you are facing Shared pool memory issues or want large number of connections, then AWE cannot help.

Further Readings

Note 225349.1 – Implementing Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) or VLM on Windows Platforms
Note 46053.1 – Windows NT Memory Architecture Overview

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/pae_os.mspx

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/win.102/b14304/architec.htm#i1005826

24 May, 2008 by Amit Bansal 10g 11g 54

oracle

Easy and Free X-Windowing Setup with Cygwin

Adding new ASM disk to RAC database fails

Transparent Application Failover – TAF

Resolving Shutdown Immediate Hang Situations

Solving ORA-1031 while connecting as “/ as sysdba” :

AWE -What is It and How to use it?

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