If you're interested in creating a TPC-H schema for testing purposes, then the following scripts may be of use to you:

Unix Scripts:
Multi Load TPCH
Load TPCH Stream

SQL*Loader Control files:
REGION Table
NATION Table
SUPPLIER Table
CUSTOMER Table
PART Table
PARTSUPP Table
ORDERS Table
LINEITEM Table

You may wish to read and check them before you use them - they're not exactly rocket science but they seem to do the job.

I have all the files in the same directory for simplicity sake.

I then use them to create a scale factor 1 target TPC-H schema using the following calls:

# "l" loads the REGION and NATION tables
./multi_load_tpch.sh 1 l "tpch/tpch@test" 1

# "s" loads the SUPPLIER table
./multi_load_tpch.sh 1 s "tpch/tpch@test" 10

# "c" loads the CUSTOMER table
./multi_load_tpch.sh 1 c "tpch/tpch@test" 10

# "p" loads the PART and PARTSUPP tables
./multi_load_tpch.sh 1 p "tpch/tpch@test" 10

# "o" loads the ORDERS and LINEITEM tables
./multi_load_tpch.sh 1 o "tpch/tpch@test" 10

Obviously, you need to change the connection string to match your environment.

Caveats:

1. Obviously, they are supplied as is - use at your own discretion and risk.
2. You need to have created the target schema tables and made sure they are empty as the SQL*Loader control files use APPEND.
3. Bear in mind that choosing too high a number of parallel streams (the last parameter in the calls) will overload your machine so try and balance it against the available system resources.

Bugs, issues or questions, please get in touch...enjoy.

Labels: benchmarking, code, dba, DW, tuning

I wanted to try out this HammerOra product from Steve Shaw, both at work and on my box at home...but after playing with it at home, I realised that it takes quite some time to build even a small (scale factor 1) TPC-H schema...I know it runs serially, but I'm still not quite sure why it's that slow (on my system that is), but Steve does say it can take a while and that you might wish to consider using the TPC utility DBGEN to generate and load the schema quicker...particularly if you use some manual parallelisation.

Given that I also need to use this tool to help with some benchmarking at work, I decided to try to get DBGEN to run on a HP-UX box today and had one or two problems which I managed to sort out. The machine in question is an RP8420 running HP-UX B.11.11.

DBGEN is a utility that allows you to create a series of flat files which contain the data for a TPC-H schema. You can then use SQL*Loader to load these into appropriately constructed tables in an Oracle database - any database actually...but I only care about Oracle of course ;-)

The utility can be called with various parameters including making the target datasets in smaller "child" files which can be created in a manually parallelised fashion to speed the whole process up. You have to download the DBGEN reference data set from the TPC website (lower right hand side).

This reference data set contains the ANSI C source code which makes the DBGEN executable (and QGEN also...but more on that another day)...unfortunately it's just the source code, so that means you need to compile it yourself...which of course leads to the first problem...that I know diddly squat about C...yeah I know, not very manly! Luckily I can sometimes follow instructions (which come with the reference data set)...

1. Copy makefile.suite to makefile
2. Edit makefile and make the following amendments (in red):

################
## CHANGE NAME OF ANSI COMPILER HERE
################
CC = gcc
# Current values for DATABASE are: INFORMIX, DB2, TDAT (Teradata)
# SQLSERVER, SYBASE
# Current values for MACHINE are: ATT, DOS, HP, IBM, ICL, MVS,
# SGI, SUN, U2200, VMS, LINUX, WIN32
# Current values for WORKLOAD are: TPCH
DATABASE= ORACLE
MACHINE = HP
WORKLOAD = TPCH

That's it for the makefile.

Now, as I mentioned, the ORACLE database is not a listed database variant in the DBGEN C code - it's got all the other popular RDBMS which I find quite bizarre...I'm sure there's a reason, but I can't think of one. To get around this, as per Chapter 5 in “Pro Oracle Database 10g RAC on Linux” by Steve Shaw and Julian Dyke, I added a section to the tpcd.h for the ORACLE database:

#ifdef ORACLE
#define GEN_QUERY_PLAN ""
#define START_TRAN ""
#define END_TRAN ""
#define SET_OUTPUT ""
#define SET_ROWCOUNT ""
#define SET_DBASE ""

I thought that was it - but it still would't compile, giving the error:

config.h:213:2: #error Support for a 64-bit datatype is required in this release

Looking at the config.h - and bearing in mind I'm no C programmer - it struck me as odd that all bar the HP machine section, had stuff about DSS_HUGE and 64 bits...so I took a punt and copied some lines (in red) from the IBM section into the HP one to see if it worked...and it did. The HP section now looks like this:

#ifdef HP
#define _INCLUDE_POSIX_SOURCE
#define STDLIB_HAS_GETOPT
#define DSS_HUGE long long
#define HUGE_FORMAT "%lld"
#define HUGE_DATE_FORMAT "%02lld"
#define RNG_A 6364136223846793005ull
#define RNG_C 1ull
#endif /* HP */

Typing make at the command prompt then compiles the code and produces the dbgen executable...which I then spent a few hours playing with to create a scale factor 1 TPC-H set of files.

My next problem was one of my own making really in that I copied the CREATE TABLE statements for the TPC-H target tables from HammerOra' TCL script for TPC-H creation, but unfortunately, the column ordering is slightly different in those DDL statements as compared to the DBGEN output files...which meant that I created the tables OK, but since I'd copied the column ordering to make the SQL*Loader control files, I got errors when I tried to load some of the files as the column order is different in one or two cases.

I then downloaded the TPC-H specification document which has, amongst other things, the data model, from which I cross checked the column ordering of the data model against the columns in the output files and then managed to rerun the data in without any further issues.

Tomorrow I'll try running HammerOra against the target TPC-H schema and make some shell scripts to try and automate most of the process so we can build different scale factor schemae and do so in a manually parallelised fashion - scripts the amiable Scotsman created for his parallel testing a while back should give me a good start with that.

Labels: benchmarking, bugs, code, dba, tuning

Here's a tale about an Oracle initialisation parameter...and a lesson we should all take note of...

For three days, my colleagues in the support team on one of the warehouses I'm involved in, were struggling with a piece of code which was exhausting the available temp space and after trying everything they could think of, they asked me to take a look. I must admit I was a little baffled at first because the piece of code in question had been happily running for some time now and every time I'd run it, I'd never noticed that TEMP was anywhere near being exhausted so, whilst I could tell the process had some kind of problem, I was in the dark as to exactly what that problem was.

After trying to break down the large query into several smaller steps, I realised that it was an early step in the query that was exhibiting the problem of temp exhaustion - the step being a pivot of around 300 million measure rows into a pivot target table.

This process runs monthly and it had run without issue on all of the previous 20 occurrences and for roughly the same, if not more rows to pivot...so it didn't appear to be the volume that was causing the problem.

There had been no changes in the code itself for many months and the current version of the code had been run successfully in previous months, so it didn't appear to be a code fault.

I obtained the actual execution path for the statement whilst it was running and it looked reasonable, although looking at it, triggered a thought in my mind...what if something had changed in the database configuration?

Why would I get that thought from looking at the execution path?

Well, a while back, we had received some advice that a line in our init.ora as follows, should be changed to set the feature to TRUE instead of FALSE, so that the feature became active:

_gby_hash_aggregation_enabled = FALSE

This results in a line in the plan that reads:

HASH GROUP BY

instead of

SORT GROUP BY

The parameter was set to FALSE due to a known bug and the issues we'd seen with it, however the recent advice we'd received, indicated that the bug had been resolved at the version level we were on and that by enabling the feature - which enables GROUP BY and Aggregation using a hash scheme - we'd gain a performance boost for certain queries.

So, the DBA team researched the advice and it appeared to be the case, that the bug (4604970) which led to the disabling of the feature was fixed at our version level (10.2.0.3 on HP-UX). We duly turned on the feature in a pre production environment and ran it for a while without noticing any issues. We then enabled it in production and again, for a while, we've not noticed any issues...until now.

After a check back through the logs, it appeared that since the parameter was first enabled, the queries which were now failing, had not been run at all...they had only run prior to the parameter change...so with my suspicions aroused further, I disabled the feature at the session level and reran the process. It completed in a normal time frame and used a small amount of TEMP - hooray!

So, now we have to go back to support to try and understand if the original bug is not quite fixed or whether this is a different scenario...in any event, we're going to disable the feature for now, even though we're only getting problems with the feature on 2 processes out of perhaps thousands.

So, what's the lesson to learn?

Well, quite simply, that you need to have a thorough audit of what configuration changes you've made together with a good audit of the processes you've run so that you can work out what has changed since the last time you successfully ran a process. This gives you a fighting chance of spotting things like the above.

Labels: bugs, dba, tuning

I really wanted to do this via AWR, but I've not been able to find out if this kind of information is stored and, if it is, how I'd get access to it...maybe someone else knows...hint hint?!

I have various queries I run whilst I'm online and processes are running, but what I really wanted, was to know the usage profile throughout the day...so, given that I couldn't find an AWR way of tracking our use of TEMP on a database, I figured I'd use a more klunky method...

DROP TABLE mgmt_t_temp_use_history PURGE
/

CREATE TABLE temp_use_history(snap_date      DATE         NOT NULL
                             ,sid            NUMBER       NOT NULL
                             ,segtype        VARCHAR2(9)  NOT NULL
                             ,qcsid          NUMBER       NULL
                             ,username       VARCHAR2(30) NULL
                             ,osuser         VARCHAR2(30) NULL
                             ,contents       VARCHAR2(9)  NULL
                             ,sqlhash        NUMBER       NULL
                             ,sql_id         VARCHAR2(13) NULL
                             ,blocks         NUMBER       NULL
                             )
PCTFREE 0
COMPRESS
NOLOGGING
/
CREATE UNIQUE INDEX tuh_pk ON
temp_use_history(snap_date,sid,segtype)
PCTFREE 0
COMPRESS
NOLOGGING
/
ALTER TABLE temp_use_history ADD CONSTRAINT tuh_pk PRIMARY
KEY(snap_date,sid,segtype)
USING INDEX
/

DECLARE
  l_program_action VARCHAR2(2000);
  l_27477 EXCEPTION;
  PRAGMA EXCEPTION_INIT(l_27477,-27477); BEGIN
  BEGIN
    DBMS_SCHEDULER.CREATE_SCHEDULE(
      schedule_name   => 'MINUTELY_5M'
     ,start_date      => SYSDATE
     ,repeat_interval => 'FREQ=MINUTELY;INTERVAL=5'
     ,comments        =>'Daily schedule to run a job every five minutes.'
                                  );
  EXCEPTION
    WHEN l_27477 THEN
      NULL;  -- Ignore if the schedule exists
  END;

  l_program_action :=                   'DECLARE';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  l_date DATE := SYSDATE; ';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'BEGIN';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  INSERT /*+ APPEND */ INTO temp_use_history(snap_date,sid,qcsid,username,osuser,contents,seg
type,sqlhash,sql_id,blocks)';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  SELECT l_date,s.sid,ps.qcsid,s.username,s.osuser,su.contents,su.segtype,su.sqlh
ash,su.sql_id,sum(su.blocks)';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  FROM   v$sort_usage su';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  ,      v$session s';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  ,      v$px_session ps';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  WHERE  s.sid=ps.sid(+)';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  AND    s.saddr =
su.session_addr';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  AND    s.serial# =
su.session_num';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  GROUP BY s.sid,ps.qcsid,s.username,s.osuser,su.contents,su.segtype,su.sqladdr,su.
sqlhash,su.sql_id;';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'  COMMIT; ';
  l_program_action := l_program_action||'END;';

  BEGIN
    DBMS_SCHEDULER.CREATE_PROGRAM(
      program_name => 'SNAP_TEMP_USAGE'
     ,program_type => 'PLSQL_BLOCK'
     ,program_action => l_program_action
     ,enabled        => TRUE
     ,comments       => 'Program to snap the temp usage into TEMP_USE_HISTORY'
                                 );
  EXCEPTION
    WHEN l_27477 THEN
      NULL;  -- Ignore if the program exists
  END;

  BEGIN
    DBMS_SCHEDULER.CREATE_JOB(
      job_name      => 'JOB_SNAP_TEMP_USAGE'
     ,program_name  => 'SNAP_TEMP_USAGE'
     ,schedule_name => 'MINUTELY_5M'
     ,enabled       => TRUE
     ,auto_drop     => FALSE
     ,comments      => 'Job to snap the temp usage into TEMP_USE_HISTORY'
                             );
  EXCEPTION
    WHEN l_27477 THEN
      NULL;  -- Ignore if the job exists
  END;
END;
/

I can now run queries against the TEMP_USE_HISTORY table to show how much TEMP has been used, when, by whom and for what use, e.g.

SQL> ed
Wrote file afiedt.buf

  1  select snap_date,round(sum(blocks)*32/1024/1024) gb
  2  from temp_use_history
  3  where snap_date > sysdate-1
  4  group by snap_date
  5  having round(sum(blocks)*32/1024/1024) > 50
  6* order by 1
SQL> /

SNAP_DATE                    GB
-------------------- ----------
26-FEB-2008 16:12:25         57
26-FEB-2008 16:17:25         65
26-FEB-2008 16:22:25         74
26-FEB-2008 16:27:25         86
26-FEB-2008 16:32:25         95
26-FEB-2008 16:37:25        107
26-FEB-2008 16:42:25        121
26-FEB-2008 16:47:25        127
26-FEB-2008 16:52:25        147
26-FEB-2008 16:57:25        160
26-FEB-2008 17:02:25        162
26-FEB-2008 17:07:25        179
26-FEB-2008 17:12:25        196
26-FEB-2008 17:17:25        208
26-FEB-2008 17:22:25        217
26-FEB-2008 17:27:25        233
26-FEB-2008 17:32:25        241
26-FEB-2008 17:37:25        251
26-FEB-2008 17:42:25        257
26-FEB-2008 17:47:25        262
26-FEB-2008 17:52:25        264
26-FEB-2008 17:57:25        267
26-FEB-2008 18:02:25        201
27-FEB-2008 00:27:25         59
27-FEB-2008 00:32:25         60
27-FEB-2008 00:37:25         69
27-FEB-2008 01:12:25         57
27-FEB-2008 02:22:25         53
27-FEB-2008 09:57:25         51

29 rows selected.

From the above, I can see that, during the last twenty four hours on the database in question, there was reasonably heavy use of the TEMP area between 4pm and 6pm yesterday, and that the load peaked at approximately 267Gb.

Labels: awr, code, dba

After Doug's comment on my earlier blog on CALIBRATE_IO, and after seeing Kevin using Mr Poll to do a RAC poll, I've now created a poll for the results people are getting from this CALIBRATE_IO routine in 11g.

If you'd like to contribute please visit using the following link:

Oracle 11g CALIBRATE_IO Results

No prizes for the "biggest"...Kevin is bound to have something in his lab that beats us all! ;-)

Thanks

Labels: dba, poll, tuning

After reading how inadequate Doug was feeling over his IO subsystem, I decided to see how quick mine was...not that we're getting into a "mine is better than yours" game, but rather to see how mine stacks up against Doug's, bearing in mind his is a 5 disk stripe natively attached to his machine (I'm assuming) and mine is a logical disk attached to a VMWare machine...although admittedly, the PC underneath this logical disk is running, motherboard based, RAID striping, over two physical SATA disks...I just figured it would be interesting to compare.

Obviously, any experiment that goes flawlessly according to a preconceived plan is:

1. Boring
2. Less educational
3. Not normally one I've done - mine always have problems it seems!

I ran the calibration on my VMWare based OpenSuse 10 linux with Oracle 11g and it immediately came up with a problem:

SQL> @io
SQL> SET SERVEROUTPUT ON
SQL> DECLARE
2    lat  INTEGER;
3    iops INTEGER;
4    mbps INTEGER;
5  BEGIN
6  -- DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO (, , iops, mbps, lat);
7     DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO (2, 10, iops, mbps, lat);
8
9     DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE ('max_iops = ' || iops);
10     DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE ('latency  = ' || lat);
11     dbms_output.put_line('max_mbps = ' || mbps);
12  end;
13  /
DECLARE
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-56708: Could not find any datafiles with asynchronous i/o capability
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_RMIN", line 453
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER", line 1153
ORA-06512: at line 7

Of course, consulting the manual led me to run this query:

SELECT name, asynch_io
FROM v$datafile f,v$iostat_file i
WHERE f.file#        = i.file_no
AND   filetype_name  = 'Data File'
/

which gave:

SQL> /

NAME                                               ASYNCH_IO
-------------------------------------------------- ---------
/home/oracle/oradata/su11/system01.dbf             ASYNC_OFF
/home/oracle/oradata/su11/sysaux01.dbf             ASYNC_OFF
/home/oracle/oradata/su11/undotbs01.dbf            ASYNC_OFF
/home/oracle/oradata/su11/users01.dbf              ASYNC_OFF
/home/oracle/oradata/su11/example01.dbf            ASYNC_OFF

...or in other words no asynchronous IO available - as the error message had said.

After altering the filesystemio_options parameter to "set_all" and bouncing the instance, a second run of the calibration process seemed to work fine...

SQL> @io
SQL> SET ECHO ON
SQL> SET SERVEROUTPUT ON
SQL> DECLARE
2    lat  INTEGER;
3    iops INTEGER;
4    mbps INTEGER;
5  BEGIN
6  -- DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO (, , iops, mbps, lat);
7     DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO (2, 10, iops, mbps, lat);
8
9     DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE ('max_iops = ' || iops);
10     DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE ('latency  = ' || lat);
11     dbms_output.put_line('max_mbps = ' || mbps);
12  end;
13  /
max_iops = 72
latency  = 13
max_mbps = 26

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

So,my figures are considerably lower than those Doug achieved:

max_iops = 112
latency  = 8
max_mbps = 32

...but not too bad I guess considering the fact that mine is a VM and the hardware I'm running is more humble...no seriously, size does not matter!

Labels: dba, errors, tuning

Now that I've got 11g up and running on OpenSuse 10.2 on a VMWare 6 VM, I've had time to do some playing with the latest and greatest release and the first thing I've noticed, when running some of Doug's PX test scripts, is that the trace files generated for PX slaves now have the Tracefile Identifier appended to their name, making it easier to see which OS Process (PID) was responsible for the creation of the trace file - makes things a little easier and clearer.

In 10gR2 (10.2.0.2.0 specifically) the trace files would come out with names in this format:

<instance name>_<PX Slave identifier>_<background process ID>.trc

e.g. fred_p001_6789.trc

In 11gR1 (11.1.0.6.0 specifically) the trace files come out with names in this format:

<instance name>_<PX Slave identifier>_<background process ID>_<Trace file identifier>.trc

e.g. fred_p001_5678_jeff.trc

This assumes you've set the tracefile identifier in the first place, otherwise that bit won't be present. Use the following to set it, choosing whatever identifier you require of course:

alter session set tracefile_identifier='jeff';

It was interesting that the location of such files has also changed due to the implementation of Automatic Diagnostic Repository (ADR). More information on that here.

Labels: dba, tuning

Whilst writing some code that referenced the DBA_SEGMENTS dictionary view today, I realised that the contents of the PARTITION_NAME column actually contains the name of the subpartition when the table is a subpartitioned table...a script and results to illustrate:

drop table jeff_unpartitioned purge
/
drop table jeff_partitioned purge
/
drop table jeff_subpartitioned purge
/
create table jeff_unpartitioned(col1 number,col2 number)
/
create table jeff_partitioned(col1 number,col2 number)
partition by range(col1)
(partition p1 values less than(100)
,partition p2 values less than(maxvalue)
)
/
create table jeff_subpartitioned(col1 number,col2 number)
partition by range(col1)
subpartition by list(col2)
subpartition template
(subpartition sub1 values(1)
,subpartition sub2 values(2)
)
(partition p1 values less than(100)
,partition p2 values less than(maxvalue)
)
/
select segment_name,partition_name,segment_type
from   user_segments
where  segment_name like 'JEFF%'
order by segment_name
/

...gives the following results...

Table dropped.

Table dropped.


Table dropped.


Table created.


Table created.


Table created.


                        Partition
SEGMENT_NAME             Name                 SEGMENT_TYPE
------------------------ ------------------
JEFF_PARTITIONED         P2                   TABLE PARTITION
JEFF_PARTITIONED         P1                   TABLE PARTITION
JEFF_SUBPARTITIONED      P1_SUB1              TABLE SUBPARTITION
JEFF_SUBPARTITIONED      P2_SUB2              TABLE SUBPARTITION
JEFF_SUBPARTITIONED      P1_SUB2              TABLE SUBPARTITION
JEFF_SUBPARTITIONED      P2_SUB1              TABLE SUBPARTITION
JEFF_UNPARTITIONED                            TABLE

7 rows selected.

As you can see, the subpartitioned table shows the subpartition name in the PARTITION_NAME column. It's not a big deal and I only noticed because I assumed there would be a SUBPARTITION_NAME column whilst I was writing my code...the failure in compilation led me to track this slightly erroneous situation down.

Why does this occur?

Well, if you delve into the code behind DBA_SEGMENTS you'll see it refers to another view in the SYS schema called SYS_DBA_SEGS. The SQL behind SYS_DBA_SEGS selects all levels (Table, Partition and subpartitions) from the SYS.OBJ$ view, but then "loses" the partitions when joining to SYS.SYS_OBJECTS (the OBJ# from SYS.OBJ$ does not map to any row in SYS.SYS_OBJECTS via the OBJECT_ID column). The SQL then "loses" the table when joining to SYS.SEG$ - exactly why it does this I don't fully understand, but I'm guessing it's because those components of the composite object don't actually have their own segment to physically store anything in since there are lower levels - in this case the subpartitions.

In any event, it's a little bit of a gotcha and the column could probably do with being renamed to SUB_SEGMENT_NAME perhaps.

Labels: bugs, dba, tuning

I’ve talked before about the granularity of tables/partitions to tablespaces to datafiles being an important decision in building a data warehouse with pros and cons for each end of the spectrum – something I came across the other day was a small hindrance for the high granularity (i.e. lots of datafiles/tablespaces) approach. Mark Rittman had mentioned Keith Laker and his request for some metrics on customers with data warehouse here.

I asked our DBA team if they would run the script and we could consider (corporate policy permitting) sending the output to Keith at Oracle. Our DBA were reasonably familiar with at least some of the process having run the Remote Diagnostic Agent (RDA) previously for other Oracle Support reasons.

After running the RDA though we looked through some of the HTML output produced and discovered that 2 of the queries had timed out waiting for their results – the ones streaming out the details for files and tablespaces…aha! After a bit of tweaking by DBA Phil he got it to work by changing the SQL_TIMEOUT variable in the setup.cfg file generated from the setup run. Originally set at 30 seconds he changed it to 2400 seconds and reran for our production instance and everything came out as expected.

Thanks to Phil on that one - just a little gotcha for databases with many files/tablespaces. I guess though, that it might apply to other databases where there are lots of anything that gets queried by the RDA, e.g. database objects or users.

Labels: dba