Kerry Osborne's Oracle Blog

Oracle’s 12.1.0.2 was released a few weeks ago (You can download it from OTN here: Oracle 12.1.0.2 Download). While technically a minor point release, it contains a couple of major features that would normally be rolled out in a more substantial version change like 12cR2 or perhaps V13. Of course the most highly anticipated feature is a new option (Oracle In-Memory Option) that provides a column oriented, in-memory store. Enkitec was in the Beta program, so we’ve been testing it out for quite a while now and we are impressed. Here’s a link to a video of a conversation between myself, Tanel Poder and Cary Millsap about the In-memory Option published prior to the general release. Note: the three of us are also scheduled to do a webcast on the topic on Sep. 17th at 9:00AM CDT. You can sign up here if you are interested: In-Memory Webcast

But back to the topic: What this new option provides is a radical departure from the way Oracle has traditionally managed data access. In the past, all data access was done using row-major format, which is a foundation of the Oracle RDBMS architecture (I’m of course leaving out some esoteric formats such as the hybrid columnar compressed (HCC) format that is available on Exadata). At any rate, this columnar format is a major change in the way data is accessed for Oracle, and while the name of the option indicates that the secret sauce is the fact that the data is accessed from memory, I’m going to argue that the “memory” part is not the most important factor. In my opinion, the column-oriented format is why it’s “The Next Big Thing”.

While accessing data from RAM is definitely faster than reading it off disk, it’s important to note that Oracle has been serving data from memory for decades via the standard buffer cache. In fact, you could describe the Oracle RDBMS as a very sophisticated disk caching mechanism. That’s certainly a vast over simplification, but it’s really not too far from reality. Many Oracle systems spend most of their time accessing data from the buffer cache. Back in the day, DBA’s even invented a metric to describe the effectiveness of the caching. The much maligned “buffer cache hit ratio” was used for that purpose and is still present in the modern day AWR reports. While tuning artificial ratios like this one has long since gone out of fashion, it’s important to note that it is not uncommon to see this ratio in the upper 90′s. (i.e. 99% of blocks being accessed from RAM is common) And in fact, we can pin tables in the buffer cache so that all rows are accessed from memory. So if that’s the case, then we should be able to compare speeds of queries executed on data in memory using both the standard row-major format and the new columnar format. Let’s give it a quick try.

Continue reading ‘The Next Big Thing’ »

I love the term “Research Lab” to refer to our collection of Oracle Engineered Systems. It’s because that’s what we do with the equipment. We test it, we try weird experiments with it, we take it apart with a screw driver and we put it back together again. And lot’s of times we break things. But better that we break them in the lab than on a production system at a client site. The lab is a great learning environment for us and our customers. Enkitec has had a pretty solid lab for a while, but it’s about to get a lot bigger.

Here’s an abbreviated list of the what we expect to end up with in the lab in the next few weeks.

• Lot’s of Exadata’s (V2, X2, X3, X4)
• A SPARC SuperCluster
• A few Exalytics’s
• At least one Exalogic
• A couple of Big Data Appliances (BDAs)
• Several Oracle Database Appliances (ODAs)
• A ZFS Appliance or 2
• An Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance (OVCA)

So here’s to the new and improved Research Lab. Hopefully a few of the new systems will have the cool built in beer shelf like out current BDA.

I’ll post some pictures when the new stuff shows up. 🙂

Just a quick post on a new Exadata feature called Zone Maps. They’re similar to storage indexes on Exadata, but with more control (you can define the columns and how the data is refreshed for example). People have complained for years that storage indexes provided no control mechanisms, but now we have a way to exert our God given rights as DBA’s to control yet another aspect of the database. Here’s a link to the 12.1.0.2 documentation which resides in the Data Warehousing Guide: Zone Map Documentation

Zone Maps are restricted to Exadata storage by the way (well probably they work on ZFS and Pillar too). Have a look at the Oracle error messages file:

>grep -i "storage type" $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/mesg/oraus.msg | grep -i "not supported"

/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/dbhome_1/rdbms/mesg/oraus.msg:31969, 00000, "ZONEMAP not supported for table stored in tablespace of this storage type"
/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/dbhome_1/rdbms/mesg/oraus.msg:64307, 00000, " Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression is not supported for tablespaces on this storage type" 
/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/dbhome_1/rdbms/mesg/oraus.msg:64309, 00000, " Hybrid Columnar Compression with row-level locking is not supported for tablespaces on this storage type."
/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/dbhome_1/rdbms/mesg/oraus.msg:65425, 00000, "CLUSTERING clause not supported for table stored in tablespace of this storage type"
/u01/app/oracle/product/12.1.0.2/dbhome_1/rdbms/mesg/oraus.msg:65451, 00000, "Advanced index compression is not supported for tablespaces on this storage type."

So according to the messages file, there are a handful of features that are restricted in this fashion (Zone Maps, HCC, Attribute Clustering and Advanced Index Compression).

As a bit of totally irrelevant history, zone maps were actually included in the 12.1.0.1 release, but the documentation on them was removed. So they worked, but they were undocumented.

Here’s an example on a 12.1.0.1 DB on a non-Exadata platform.

SQL*Plus: Release 12.1.0.1.0 Production on Wed Aug 13 15:41:46 2014

Copyright (c) 1982, 2013, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition Release 12.1.0.1.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, Automatic Storage Management, OLAP, Advanced Analytics
and Real Application Testing options


INSTANCE_NAME    STARTUP_TIME      CURRENT_TIME         DAYS    SECONDS
---------------- ----------------- ----------------- ------- ----------
LAB1211          13-AUG-2014 09:54 13-AUG-2014 15:41     .24      20820

SYS@LAB1211> create table kso.junk1 (col1 number, col2 number) clustering by linear order (col1,col2);
create table kso.junk1 (col1 number, col2 number) clustering by linear order (col1,col2)
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-65425: CLUSTERING clause not supported for table stored in tablespace of this storage type


SYS@LAB1211> create table kso.junk1 (col1 number, col2 number);

Table created.

SYS@LAB1211> create materialized zonemap skew_zonemap on kso.junk1(col1);
create materialized zonemap skew_zonemap on kso.junk1(col1)
                                                          *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-31969: ZONEMAP not supported for table stored in tablespace of this storage type

Note that both zone maps and attribute clustering were disallowed with the “not supported for table stored in tablespace of this storage type” error message.

By the way, attribute clustering is another interesting new feature of 12g that allows you to declaratively instruct Oracle to store data on disk in a sorted order. This physical ordering can have big benefit for storage indexes or zone maps (or any btree index where clustering factor is important for that matter). Oracle’s new In-Memory column store also has a min/max pruning feature (storage indexes) which means physical ordering on disk is important with that feature as well.

Anyway, here’s a link to the 12.1.0.2 documentation on attribute clustering which also resides in the Data Warehousing Guide: Attribute Clustering Documentation

And here’s another example using 12.1.0.2 on an Exadata.

SQL*Plus: Release 12.1.0.2.0 Production on Wed Aug 13 15:42:18 2014

Copyright (c) 1982, 2014, Oracle.  All rights reserved.


Connected to:
Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition Release 12.1.0.2.0 - 64bit Production
With the Partitioning, Automatic Storage Management, OLAP, Advanced Analytics
and Real Application Testing options


INSTANCE_NAME    STARTUP_TIME      CURRENT_TIME         DAYS    SECONDS
---------------- ----------------- ----------------- ------- ----------
INMEM            24-JUL-2014 18:35 13-AUG-2014 15:42   19.88    1717600

Elapsed: 00:00:00.00
SYS@INMEM> @test_zonemap
SYS@INMEM> create table kso.junk1 (col1 number, col2 number) clustering by linear order (col1,col2);

Table created.

Elapsed: 00:00:00.01
SYS@INMEM> create materialized zonemap skew_zonemap on kso.junk1(col1);

Materialized zonemap created.

Elapsed: 00:00:00.15
SYS@INMEM> 
SYS@INMEM> -- so as expected, we're able to create an attribute clustered table and a zone map on Exadata
SYS@INMEM> 
SYS@INMEM> -- Let's try creating a tablespace that is not on Exa storage (even though the DB is on EXA platform)
SYS@INMEM> 
SYS@INMEM> create tablespace KSO_NON_EXA datafile '/home/oracle/KSO_NON_EXA.dbf' size 100M;

Tablespace created.

Elapsed: 00:00:00.38
SYS@INMEM> @tablespaces

TABLESPACE_NAME STATUS    CONTENTS  LOGGING   EXTENT_MGT ALLOC_TYP SPACE_MGT BLOCK_SIZE PREDICA
--------------- --------- --------- --------- ---------- --------- --------- ---------- -------
CLASS_DATA      ONLINE    PERMANENT LOGGING   LOCAL      SYSTEM    AUTO            8192 STORAGE
EXAMPLE         ONLINE    PERMANENT NOLOGGING LOCAL      SYSTEM    AUTO            8192 STORAGE
KSO_NON_EXA     ONLINE    PERMANENT LOGGING   LOCAL      SYSTEM    AUTO            8192 HOST      <=== 
SYSAUX          ONLINE    PERMANENT LOGGING   LOCAL      SYSTEM    AUTO            8192 STORAGE
SYSTEM          ONLINE    PERMANENT LOGGING   LOCAL      SYSTEM    MANUAL          8192 STORAGE
TEMP            ONLINE    TEMPORARY NOLOGGING LOCAL      UNIFORM   MANUAL          8192 STORAGE
UNDOTBS1        ONLINE    UNDO      LOGGING   LOCAL      SYSTEM    MANUAL          8192 STORAGE
USERS           ONLINE    PERMANENT LOGGING   LOCAL      SYSTEM    AUTO            8192 STORAGE

8 rows selected.

Elapsed: 00:00:00.02
SYS@INMEM> 
SYS@INMEM> -- note that tablespace KSO_NON_EXA is on local disk, not Exadata storage servers, so PREDICATE_EVALUATION is set to HOST.
SYS@INMEM> 
SYS@INMEM> drop table kso.junk1;

Table dropped.

Elapsed: 00:00:00.01
SYS@INMEM> create table kso.junk1 (col1 number, col2 number) clustering by linear order (col1,col2) tablespace kso_non_exa;

Table created.

Elapsed: 00:00:00.01
SYS@INMEM> select owner, table_name, tablespace_name from dba_tables where table_name like 'JUNK1';

OWNER                TABLE_NAME                     TABLESPACE_NAME
-------------------- ------------------------------ ---------------
KSO                  JUNK1                          KSO_NON_EXA

Elapsed: 00:00:00.01
SYS@INMEM> 
SYS@INMEM> -- wow - that's a bit of a surprise, clustered table create worked on non-Exa storage
SYS@INMEM> -- maybe the check is done on some other level than the tablespace
SYS@INMEM> 
SYS@INMEM> create materialized zonemap skew_zonemap on kso.junk1(col1);
create materialized zonemap skew_zonemap on kso.junk1(col1)
                                                          *
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-31969: ZONEMAP not supported for table stored in tablespace of this storage type


Elapsed: 00:00:00.00

So as you can see, attempting to create the zone map on non-Exa storage failed as expected. But I was able to create a clustered table on non-Exa storage, which is a little weird. So while the error message for attribute clustering exists in the messages file, it doesn’t appear that there is a check in the code, at least at the tablespace level. I don’t have a 12.1.0.2 install on a non-Exadata platform at the moment to test it out, but if you do, please let me know.

That’s it for now. I hope to do some more detailed posts on In-Memory, Zone Maps, Attribute Clustering in the near future. As always, your comments are welcomed.