The error occurred when switching from MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE to MAXIMUM AVAILABILITY Data Guard mode on an Exadata system. The primary RAC database, running on version 19c, crashed with an ORA-600 error code. The error mentioned that the redo log for group 45, sequence 509, was incorrectly located on DAX storage, causing issues. The incident details pointed to an internal error code [kfk_iodone_invalid_buffer], indicating that an I/O buffer did not pass HARD checks. The error was associated with the LGWR background process.

Changes
The issue arose after changing the Data Guard mode to MAXIMUM AVAILABILITY; switching to MAXIMUM PROTECTION did not trigger the ORA-600 error. Interestingly, a 12c database within the same Exadata rack did not experience the ORA-600 error. The problem manifested when the online or standby redo log files were located on Extreme Flash Cell or High Capacity Cell nodes. The system applied the following relevant patches: Patch 30165493, fixing log file fast sync parameters for PMEMLOG, Bug 31119057 associated with the ORA-600 error, and Bug 31305624 linked to instance crashes.

Solution
When transitioning to MAXIMUM AVAILABILITY Data Guard mode on Exadata, specific steps must be taken to resolve the ORA-600 [kfk_iodone_invalid_buffer] error.

Firstly, dynamic parameters must be set on all database instances: ‘_smart_log_threshold_usec‘ should be set to 0.

For Exadata systems with PMEM, ‘_exa_pmemlog_threshold_usec‘ must also be set to 0.

Furthermore, it is necessary to download and implement patch 31305624 from support.oracle.com.

Lastly, updating the system to version 19.6.0.0.200114DBRU or a higher version that includes the bug fix is part of the solution.

The symptoms include issues such as the ‘ALTER DATABASE OPEN’ process not completing as logged in the alert log file. DIA0 (Hang Manager reports) sessions are also blocked while waiting for ‘gc freelist.’ The hang manager reports instances waiting for ‘cursor: pin S wait on X’ and ‘gc freelist’, which can lead to extended waiting times and potentially block other sessions.

Diagnosis by MMAN and Development

MMAN (Memory Manager) indicates an ORA-4031 error related to the shared pool, potentially caused by the bug identified as BUG 31459369. This bug leads to multiple incidents of ORA-00600 [15709], [29] during parallel execution. Development has confirmed that SGA_TARGET usage can result in an imbalance in the number of Lock Elements (LE) assigned to LMS processes on NUMA machines, along with setting a minimum size for the buffer cache due to this bug.

Workaround Suggested

To address the issues caused by the bug, the recommended workaround is to establish a minimum size for the database buffer cache and shared pool. By setting these minimum sizes, the workaround aims to mitigate the effects of the bug identified as BUG 31459369, which triggers incidents of ORA-00600 [15709], [29] with parallel execution.

This error is triggered when trying to update a column in a table that is part of a correlated subquery involving the same table. This issue was encountered in Oracle databases of versions equal to or greater than 12.1 but below 12.2, with 12.1.0.2 being the confirmed affected version.

Description:
The error was caused by a regression that prevented the correct marking of the compare column in cases where there is a correlation column from the same table but a different view. This regression led to the ORA-00600 [qeselupdpre_20] error when executing certain update statements within the specified version range of Oracle databases.

Version Affected:
The problem affects Oracle database versions from 12.1 to 12.2, with the specific version 12.1.0.2 (Server Patch Set) confirmed to experience this issue. It’s crucial to note that this problem does not extend to versions 12.2 and above.

Workaround:
Unfortunately, there is no available workaround for the ORA-00600 [qeselupdpre_20] error in the affected versions of the Oracle database. Users encountering this issue are advised to proceed directly to the fix provided by Oracle.

Fixed:
The fix for the bug causing the ORA-00600 [qeselupdpre_20] error is first included in Oracle database version 12.2.0.1 (Base Release). Users experiencing this problem should consider upgrading their Oracle database to version 12.2.0.1 or later to resolve this issue.

If you require a certain number of backups to be retained, you can set the retention policy based on the redundancy option. This option requires that a specified number of backups be cataloged before any backup is identified as obsolete. The default retention policy has a redundancy of 1, which means that only one backup of a file must exist at any given time. A backup is deemed obsolete when a more recent version of the same file has been backed up. For example, you can use the following command to configure a redundancy recovery policy of 2:

CONFIGURE RETENTION POLICY TO REDUNDANCY 2;

When patching an Oracle home, you might run into problems. OPatch might not behave as expected. It is helpful to know where to look for error messages or find additional information to pass on to Oracle Support if you want to log an SR for your problem. So OPatch maintains logs for apply, rollback, and lsinventory operations. The OPatch log files are located in the $ORACLE_HOME/cfgtoollogs/opatch. Each time you run OPatch, a new log file is created, and each log file is tagged with the operation’s timestamp. OPatch maintains an index of processed commands and log files in the opatch_history.txt file – and that is also in the above-mentioned $ORACLE_HOME/cfgtoollogs/opatch directory. So if you change the directory to $ORACLE_HOME/cfgtoollogs/opatch, you’ll see that every time you run OPatch, a log file is created with a date stamp. And then, at the bottom, you’ll see an opatch_history.txt file. look at the file, you’ll see a record of each time you ran the opatch apply, opatch rollback, or lsinventory command. The DBMS_QOPATCH package provides a PL/SQL or a SQL interface to view the installed database patches.

The package returns the patch and patch metadata information available as part of the “opatch lsinventory -xml” command in real-time. So it’s basically a way to see which patches are applied to your database home but from a PL/SQL or a SQL interface. So you basically get an XML-formatted return of your patch information. The DBMS_QOPATCH package allows users to query what patches are installed from SQL*Plus, write wrapper programs to create reports and do validation checks across multiple environments, and also to check patches installed on cluster nodes from a single location. If you log into SQL*Plus as the sys user and then perform select DBMS_QOPATCH.GET_OPATCH_LSINVENTORY from dual. And you’ll see just lots of XML information – which you can use an XML parser to make sense of it.

You query V$INSTANCE_RECOVERY view and consistently receive an OPTIMAL_LOGFILE_SIZE value that is greater than the size of your smallest online redo log file. The OPTIMAL_LOGFILE_SIZE column of the V$INSTANCE_RECOVERY view can be used to determine the appropriate size for all of the online redo log files in your database. If the value of the OPTIMAL_LOGFILE_SIZE column is greater than the size of your smallest online redo log file, you should change the size of all online redo log files to be at least this value. In addition, the FAST_START_MTTR_TARGET initialization parameter simplifies the configuration of recovery time from instance or system failure. After adjusting the size of your online redo log files, you may be able to adjust the value of this initialization parameter for better performance. This is done by rerunning the MTTR advisor after changing the size of your online redo log file to achieve more optimal results. However, running the MTTR advisor is not the best option in this situation for improving instance recovery performance.

 

Starting in Oracle Database 12c, the multithreaded Oracle model enables specific Oracle processes to execute as operating system threads in separate address spaces. Setting up an Oracle database instance for using multi-process multi-thread architecture is done by starting up the Oracle database instance with the THREADED_EXECUTION initialization parameter set to TRUE.

The multi-process multi-thread model requires a password file for SYSDBA authentication while starting the database instance. Without using the SYS password

an  ORA-1031: insufficient privileges error will be triggered on startup.

When the THREADED_EXECUTION parameter is set to TRUE, you must set the DEDICATED_THROUGH_BROKER_LISTENER parameter to ON in your listener.ora file.

When that parameter is set, the listener knows that it should not spawn an OS process when a connect request is received; instead, it passes the request to the database so that a database thread is spawned and answers the connection.

 

 

 

Today, 18th January 2022, The Database patch bundles were released.
All the details on MOS in Doc ID 19202201.9 and Doc ID 21202201.9 are recommended to be installed on production systems.

 

Oracle Groundbreakers EMEA 2021
Michigan Oracle Users Summit 2021 –

Oracle Machine Learning for R (OML4R) is an R API that makes the open-source R statistical programming language and environment ready for enterprise and big data. Designed for significant data problems, OML4R integrates R with Oracle Database.
R users can run R commands and scripts for statistical and graphical analyses on data stored in the Oracle Database. In addition, they can develop, refine and deploy R scripts that leverage the parallelism and scalability of the database to automate data analysis.

For more information, see: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/machine-learning/oml4r/1.5.1/tasks.html