Wednesday, September 22, 2010

What is Oracle Goldengate?

After Oracle corp. acquiring Goldengate software there is a lot of buzz about Oracle Goldengate and it is one of the hot topics at Oracle open world 2010.

Oracle Goldengate can be used as a replication tool, ETL, and even as a DR solution.

Oracle Goldengate (GG) is probably the best replication software and it is very easy to configure and deploy it in large scale environment. Here are some of the things you need to be aware of:

1) All GG configuration files are ascii text based files. Very easy to make changes but it is prone to human errors in an environment having many DBA's working on it.

2) In order to use parallel apply threads, GG breaks down the database transaction into multiple transactions based on the hashing key defined for range split of the data. So, transactional consistency will not be guaranteed during real time but there won't be any data loss, but make sure that your application can tolerate this.

3) If there is no primary key or unique index exists on any table, GG will use all the columns as supplemental logging key pair for both extracts and replicats. But if you define key columns in the GG extract parameter file and if you don't have the supplemental logging enabled on that key columns combination, then GG will assume missing key columns record data as "NULL", which is a huge deal, and this will introduce logical data corruption on the target.

4) GG started supporting bulk data loads with their 11.1 release but any NOLOGGING data changes will be silently ignored without any warning.

5) GG doesn't support compression on the source database.

6) GG does support DDL replication but it is not easy to do selective DDL replication, it replicates every DDL that happens on the source database which is not desirable for some customers.

7) Tables being replicated to on the target can also be written to by any other application or DBA's.

8) GG supports ignoring data conflicts for updates after the first instantiation of the target database until it catches up. But it is very easy to forget turning off that parameter and any updates being lost will not be alerted by GG.

9) GG still works by reverse engineering the Oracle redolog. This may not be totally true with GG 11, but I expect GG to interpret Oracle redo more directly in later versions of 11 or 12.

10) GG dynamically decides to change the key columns that form the supplemental logging based on the state of primary key (i.e. in VALIDATED or NONVALIDATED state), which can introduce data corruptions on the target databases as the expected key columns data is missing in the trail files and they will be set to NULL. They now have the patch available for this, you can set "_USEALLKEYCOLUMNS and ALLOWNONVALIDATEDKEYS" parameters in GLOBALS file to get around this problem.


Use cases:

I think Oracle is not promoting logical standby as much as they should have. Oracle logical standby guarantees data consistency, data integrity, maintains order of transactions, and doesn't let target database tables to be modified by others which by itself offer great confidence in data quality.

Oracle Xstreams offers greatest flexibility and superior performance in extracting data from the source database and applying the same to the target database.

For Oracle database upgrades or having a logical DR standby it is better to use Oracle logical standby, use Xstreams if you want more flexibility and high performance in moving data across databases, and use GG for keeping the downstream database up to date for reporting, ETL purposes, or to move data across hybrid databases.

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posted by Saibabu Devabhaktuni @ 11:40 AM 16 comments

Monday, September 06, 2010

Undocumented 11g new features of standby database

Apart from the documented new features of being able to use BCT (block change tracking) on the physical standby, ability to use rman duplicate command over the sqlnet to build physical standby from the primary database, here are some of the undocumented features (or change in behavior) introduced as of 11.2.0.1:

1) Ability to defer log boundary checkpoints ("_defer_log_boundary_ckpt")
2) Ability to define number of logs checkpoint can get behind ("_defer_log_count")
3) Media recovery process now reads maximum of 1024 pending asynch block reads
4) DBWR only do the writes for incremental checkpoint unless free buffer is requested
5) v$recovery_progress view is updated even when only few redo blocks applied by the MRP
6) Removed v$standby_apply_snapshot view.
7) More smoothened incremental recovery checkpoint writes

The best feature among the above is the ability to defer checkpoints happen at the log boundary.

Parameters "_defer_log_boundary_ckpt" set to "TRUE" by default and "_defer_log_count" set to 2 by default will automatically get in to play only when the physical standby is actively applying the logs instead of waiting for redo or logs to arrive in managed recovery mode.

During my tests, changing "_defer_log_count" to different values didn't work, Oracle seems to use value 2 only (more testing is needed).

If standby ever falls behind or catching up, it doesn't have to wait for the mandatory checkpoint at the log boundary to finish before applying the next log, which is a big deal if the underlying storage system can only support limited iops.

Media recovery process on the standby will read the data blocks in parallel, Oracle used "db file parallel read" wait event for this until 9i, starting 10g they changed it to "recovery read" wait event.

In 10g, MRP process can keep issuing asynch data block read requests in batches until the overall outstanding block reads for a given MRP process reach 4096. This has caused a havoc in our 10g standbys, as this huge burst of I/O caused underlying SAN to suffer even worse (finally causing corruptions). They have done it to improve the performance of redo apply.

Oracle silently changed it to read 1024 outstanding asynch block reads in 11g.

In order to even out the write activity, dbwr seems to be doing incremental recovery checkpoint writes only, unless dbwr is asked to free up buffers, (you can verify it by setting "_disable_incremental_recovery_ckpt" to true ). By default dbwr is writing once the checkpoint batch size reach 500 as defined by the parameter "_incremental_recovery_ckpt_min_batch".

These are great improvements to the performance of physical standby apply process, but it'd be even better if we can control how many logs checkpoint can defer by so that we can do one big mandatory checkpoint for every few logs and have a big enough sga to control the physical reads, this will improve the performance of standby apply process and reduce the overall I/O.

Only downside to this is, if standby crashes, it'd have to apply all the logs since the last checkpoint. But physical standby for RAC databases will greatly benefit from it especially when you have many nodes.

I've opened enhancement request 9943911 for the above request.

Overall, these are great improvements Oracle has introduced in 11g.

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posted by Saibabu Devabhaktuni @ 3:19 PM 4 comments