Are you getting the most out of your Exadata performance? Part 1

In almost all of the Exadata migration projects I’ve been part of, the client sees immediate speedup & performance increase when testing their workload on Exadata (of course, we’ve made sure that we do plan & execute the tasks right). However, my performance geek’s nature usually doesn’t allow to stop there and leave the client with just 2x or 3x performance increase. For data warehousing and reporting workloads, Exadata can do much better than just 2-3x performance increase! 

This is why I will write this article series about Getting the Most out of your Exadata Performance. I will write a bunch of random articles, based on my experience and lessons learned – and some day I may consolidate it all into a more formal paper.

So, here’s the first article (PDF format).

Enjoy! :-)

(Leave your comments & feedback here …)

Secret hacking session – full scans, direct path reads, object level checkpoints, ORA-8103s!

FREE STUFF !!! FREE STUFF !!! FREE STUFF !!!
At the last week’s Expert Oracle Exadata virtual conference both me and Kerry touched the topic of how smart scan (and direct path read) decisions are done for each scanned segment during the SQL execution runtime – and not by the optimizer during the optimization phase.
I got a few follow-up questions about this yesterday and I also recall a similar question after my Understanding Exadata Performance Metrics presentation I did for UKOUG in London in April.
I think this is a topic which deserves some deeper coverage and so I decided I’ll do another secret hacking session on Tuesday 9th August (2011) 9-11am PDT.
The topics (hopefully) covered will be:
  1. How do full table scans work
  2. How and why do the “ORA-8103: object no longer exists” happen
  3. How does Oracle (11g) decide between a buffered full table scan and a direct path read scan (plus smart scan in Exadata)
  4. What’s the difference between an object_id and data_object_id?
  5. and more!
Note that while I do touch the Exadata topic a bit too, this session is generic and useful for anyone full scanning tables on any Oracle database… :)
This event is free and you can sign up here:

P.S. I will record the event and publish the video too. So if you’re in Australia or Hong Kong, no need to stay up late ;-)

The First Exadata Virtual Conference in the World!

We have been secretly planning something with Kerry Osborne – and now it’s official – we will host The First Exadata Virtual Conference in the World, on 3-4 August 2011.

This conference takes place a couple of weeks after our Expert Oracle Exadata book is published (on 18. July – check out the awesome new cover design). So, we thought it’d be a good idea to run this conference, where we can explain some things in a different format, do live demos and answer questions that attendees have.

On the first day Kerry and Randy will talk about some serious fundamentals of Exadata, like how Exadata Smart Scan Offloading works and how to make the IO resource manager work for you (especially important in mixed workload consolidated environments).

And on the second day we’ll dig even deeper, with Andy Colvin talking about how to survive Exadata patching (he has patched more Exadatas than anyone else I know) and me following up with some complex performance troubleshooting stories I’ve encountered recently (trust me – there’s a LOT of issues to troubleshoot ;-)

About the Conference:

Since its release, Oracle Exadata quickly became a hit. Due to the relative “youth” of Exadata technology and internal behavior changes introduced with frequent patch-sets, there’s not much up-to-date quality technical information and know-how available to public. This virtual conference brings you a chance to learn from the leading Exadata experts, from their experience of working with real Exadata environments, from Exadata V1 to the latest X2-8. Additionally, there is plenty of Q&A time scheduled, so you can also get answers to your Exadata-related questions.

The speakers are probably some of the most experienced Exadata consultants in the world, in the field of Exadata deployment, migration, performance, and troubleshooting. Also, Kerry, Randy and Tanel are the authors of the Expert Oracle Exadata book published by Apress in July 2011.

Dates:

  • 3-4 August 2011

Location:

  • Online (or should I say “the Cloud” ;-)

Duration:

  • 8am – 12pm (PST) on both days – 2 x 1.5h sessions on each day, with Q&A sessions and a break in between

Speakers:

  • Kerry Osborne, Randy Johnson, Andy Colvin from Enkitec
  • Tanel Poder from right here :-)

All of the speakers are hard-core hands-on professionals, having worked on many different real-life (production) Exadata environments of their clients. Enkitec dudes didn’t stop there, they bought a half rack for themselves, just for playing around with it. Yeah (+1 from me), some people buy a red hot Ferrari, some buy a red hot computer rack with an X on it :-)

Price:

  • 375 USD (early bird until 22. July), 475 regular price

More information, abstracts and registration:

I don’t think you’ll find an Exadata learning opportunity like this from anywhere else (and any time soon), especially considering the price!

This conference is so hot, that one of the attendees managed to sign up to it even before I had published this page to the world! :-)


For Exadata geeks

Just letting you know that we are all (almost) done with the Expert Oracle Exadata book work and it will be published in less than a month!!!

Expect (many) new blog entries soon! :-)

Update, things of interest and a couple of blogs to check out

tech.E2SN secret hacking session on Tuesday 22nd March:

Just in case you missed it – there’s still chance to sign up to my tomorrow’s ORA-4031 and shared pool hacking session. I initially planned to limit the attendees to 100 per event (as the limited GotoWebinar package is cheaper that way) but over 100 people had signed up for the US event on the day of announcement, even before it was 8am in California, so I figured I should invest a bit more and allow more people attend. So far over 500 people have signed up (total for both events). If you haven’t done so, you can sign up here:

Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting online seminar Deep Dives 1-5  on 11-15 April:

The next AOT deep dives (1-5) will start in 3 weeks, on 11-15 April. (and 6-10 will be on 9-13 May).

Check the details here:

Blogs to check out:

Andrey Nikolaev has done some serious low-level research on Oracle latches and KGX mutexes and he also presented his work this year at Hotsos Symposium (I missed his session as I was stuck in JFK instead of attending the conference on that day):

Porus Havewala is quite a Grid Control and OEM enthusiast. If you are into OEM & GC, check out his blog:

Future events:

  • I will be speaking at the UKOUG Exadata Special Event on 18th April
  • I will announce some more Virtual Conferences pretty soon!!! Very interesting topics and good speakers – including (but not limited to) some serious Exadata technical contents!

Exadata CAN do smart scans on bitmap indexes

As I’m finishing up a performance chapter for the Exadata book (a lot of work!), I thought to take a quick break and write a blog entry.

This is not really worth putting into my Oracle Exadata Performance series (which so far has only 1 article in it anyway) .. so this is a little stand-alone article …

Everybody knows that the Exadata smart scan can be used when scanning tables (and table partitions). You should also know that smart scan can be used with fast full scan on Oracle B-tree indexes (a fast full scan on an index segment is just like a full table scan, only on the index segment (and ignoring branch blocks)).

For some reason there’s a (little) myth circulating that smart scans aren’t used for scanning bitmap indexes.

So, here’s evidence, that smart scan can be used when scanning bitmap indexes:

SQL> select /*+ tanel3 */ count(*) from t1 where owner like '%XYZXYZ%';

...

Plan hash value: 39555139

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                             | Name        | E-Rows | Cost (%CPU)|
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                      |             |        |   505 (100)|
|   1 |  SORT AGGREGATE                       |             |      1 |            |
|   2 |   BITMAP CONVERSION COUNT             |             |    400K|   505   (0)|
|*  3 |    BITMAP INDEX STORAGE FAST FULL SCAN| BI_T1_OWNER |        |            |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   3 - storage(("OWNER" LIKE '%XYZXYZ%' AND "OWNER" IS NOT NULL))
       filter(("OWNER" LIKE '%XYZXYZ%' AND "OWNER" IS NOT NULL))

So, as you see the execution plan sure shows a FAST FULL SCAN on a BITMAP INDEX segment, which happens to be on Exadata STORAGE.

Also, you see a storage() predicate applied on the line 3 of the execution plan, which means that Oracle will attempt to use a smart scan predicate offload – but this can’t always be done!

So, you can’t really determine whether a smart scan happened during execution just by looking into the execution plan, you should really check some V$SESSION statistics too. That’s where my Snapper script becomes handy.

I started Snapper on my session just before running the above query. The “smart table scan” and “smart index scan” performance counters are updated right after Oracle has opened the segment header and determines, from the number of blocks in the segment, whether to call the smart scan codepath or not. In other words, the smart scan counters are inremented in the beginning of the segment scan.

The output is following (some irrelevant counters are stripped for brevity):


@snapper all 5 1 "301"
Sampling SID 301 with interval 5 seconds, taking 1 snapshots...
setting stats to all due to option = all

-- Session Snapper v3.52 by Tanel Poder @ E2SN ( http://tech.e2sn.com )

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    SID, USERNAME  , TYPE, STATISTIC                                                 ,     HDELTA, HDELTA/SEC,    %TIME, GRAPH
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    301, TANEL     , STAT, physical read total IO requests                           ,         13,        2.6,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, physical read total multi block requests                  ,          4,         .8,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, physical read requests optimized                          ,          1,         .2,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, physical read total bytes optimized                       ,      8.19k,      1.64k,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, physical read total bytes                                 ,      4.63M,     925.7k,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, cell physical IO interconnect bytes                       ,     10.02k,         2k,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, physical reads                                            ,        565,        113,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, physical reads cache                                      ,          1,         .2,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, physical reads direct                                     ,        564,      112.8,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, physical read IO requests                                 ,         13,        2.6,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, physical read bytes                                       ,      4.63M,     925.7k,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, db block changes                                          ,          1,         .2,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, cell physical IO bytes eligible for predicate offload     ,      4.62M,    924.06k,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, cell physical IO interconnect bytes returned by smart scan,      1.82k,      364.8,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, cell blocks processed by cache layer                      ,        564,      112.8,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, cell blocks processed by txn layer                        ,        564,      112.8,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, cell blocks processed by index layer                      ,        564,      112.8,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, cell blocks helped by minscn optimization                 ,        564,      112.8,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, cell index scans                                          ,          1,         .2,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, index fast full scans (full)                              ,          1,         .2,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, index fast full scans (direct read)                       ,          1,         .2,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, bytes sent via SQL*Net to client                          ,        334,       66.8,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, bytes received via SQL*Net from client                    ,        298,       59.6,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client                         ,          2,         .4,
    301, TANEL     , STAT, cell flash cache read hits                                ,          1,         .2,
    301, TANEL     , TIME, hard parse elapsed time                                   ,     1.17ms,    233.8us,      .0%, |          |
    301, TANEL     , TIME, parse time elapsed                                        ,      1.5ms,    300.2us,      .0%, |          |
    301, TANEL     , TIME, DB CPU                                                    ,       11ms,      2.2ms,      .2%, |          |
    301, TANEL     , TIME, sql execute elapsed time                                  ,     82.2ms,    16.44ms,     1.6%, |@         |
    301, TANEL     , TIME, DB time                                                   ,    84.36ms,    16.87ms,     1.7%, |@         |
    301, TANEL     , WAIT, enq: KO - fast object checkpoint                          ,    16.18ms,     3.24ms,      .3%, |          |
    301, TANEL     , WAIT, gc cr grant 2-way                                         ,      223us,     44.6us,      .0%, |          |
    301, TANEL     , WAIT, gc current grant 2-way                                    ,      136us,     27.2us,      .0%, |          |
    301, TANEL     , WAIT, cell smart index scan                                     ,    56.04ms,    11.21ms,     1.1%, |@         |
    301, TANEL     , WAIT, SQL*Net message to client                                 ,        7us,      1.4us,      .0%, |          |
    301, TANEL     , WAIT, SQL*Net message from client                               ,      4.42s,   884.47ms,    88.4%, |@@@@@@@@@ |
    301, TANEL     , WAIT, cell single block physical read                           ,      541us,    108.2us,      .0%, |          |
    301, TANEL     , WAIT, events in waitclass Other                                 ,     2.22ms,    443.2us,      .0%, |          |
--  End of Stats snap 1, end=2011-03-13 19:36:31, seconds=5

As you see from the above “cell index scans” statistic – indeed one index segment was scanned using the cell smart scan method.

So, I would rather call this feature “smart segment scan” to reflect that smart scan can scan more than just tables…

I guess one of the reasons why few people have seen smart bitmap index scans in action is that (single-column) bitmap indexes tend to be small. Smaller than corresponding table segments and B-tree index segments. On partitioned tables they’re much more likely going to be under the “_small_table_threshold” calculation which is used for determining whether to do a direct path full segment scan or not (yes, the _small_table_threshold applies to fast full index scan and fast full bitmap index scan too, not just table scans). So, it’s likely that Oracle chooses to do a regular, buffered full bitmap segment scan and thus won’t even consider using smart scan (as smart scans require direct path reads).

By the way – the direct path read (or not) decision is done per segment – not per object (like a table or index). So if you have 10 partitions in a table (or index), half of them are large, half are smaller, then Oracle may end up using direct path reads (and smart scan) on 5 of them and buffered (dumb) scan on the other 5. If you run something like Snapper on the session, then you’d see the smart scan counters go up by 5 only. As written above, Oracle decides whether to do direct path reads (and smart scan) right after opening the header block of a segment (partition) and reading out how many blocks this partition’s segment has below HWM.

The above applied to serial direct path reads – the Parallel Execution slaves should always read using direct path mode, right? …. Wrong :)

Well, partially wrong… In 11.2.0.2, if the parallel_degree_policy = manual, then yes, PX slaves behave like usual and always force a direct path read (and try to use a smart scan). However, with parallel_degree_policy = AUTO, which is the future of PX auto-management, Oracle can decide to do a buffered parallel scan instead, again disabling the use of smart scan…

One more note – I didn’t say anything about whether you should or should not use (bitmap) indexes on Exadata, it’s an entirely different discussion. I just brought out that the smart scan is used for scanning table segments, B-tree index segments and bitmap index segments if conditions are right.

And in the end I have to say…. that even with this evidence you can’t be fully sure that a smart scan was used throughout the entire segment, but more about this in the book and perhaps in a later blog article. We have interesting times ahead ;-)

Exadata Training – I’ll be speaking at the 1-day UKOUG Exadata Special Event on 18th April

Hi all,

As my frequent readers know, I have promised to not travel anymore as it’s just too much hassle compared to the benefit of being “there”. This is why I’m going to fly to London on Monday, 18th April to speak at the UKOUG Exadata Special Event. This event is just too sexy to be missed, so I made an exception (the last one, I promise!)… and it’s probably going to be warmer there as well compared to where I am now :-)

I will be talking about what’s been my focus area for last year or so – Oracle Exadata Performance.

Dan Norris and Alex Gorbachev will be speaking there too, so it should end up being a pretty awesome event!

More details here:

My abstract is following:

Understanding Exadata Performance: Metrics and Wait Events

In order to systematically troubleshoot and optimize Exadata performance, one must understand the meaning of its performance metrics.

This session provides a deep technical walkthrough of how Exadata IO and smart scans work and how to use relevant metrics for troubleshooting related performance issues. We will review both Exadata database and cell-level metrics, cell wait events and tools useful for troubleshooting. We will also look into metrics related to Exadata Hybrid Columnar Compression and the cell Flash Cache usage.

P.S. The reason why I called this post “Exadata Training” is that you’ll learn some real world practical stuff there… as opposed to the marketing material (and marketing material copy material) overdose out there… ;-)

Oracle Exadata Performance series – Part 1: Should I use Hugepages on Linux Database Nodes?

There was a question in LinkedIn forum about whether Linux Hugepages should be used in Oracle Exadata Database layer, as they aren’t enabled by default during ACS install. I’m putting my answer into this blog entry – apparently LinkedIn forums have a limit of 4000 characters per reply… (interestingly familiar number, by the way…:)

So, I thought that it’s time to start writing my Oracle Exadata Performance series articles what I’ve planned for a while… with some war stories from the field, some stuff what I’ve overcome when researching for writing the Expert Oracle Exadata book etc.

I’ve previously published an article about Troubleshooting Exadata Smart Scan performance and some slides from my experience with VLDB Data Warehouse migrations to Exadata.

Here’s the first article (initially planned as a short response in LinkedIn, but it turned out much longer though):

As far as I’ve heard, the initial decision to not enable hugepages by default was that the hugepages aren’t flexible & dynamic enough – you’ll have to always configure the hugepages at OS level to match your desired SGA size (to avoid wastage). So, different shops may want radically different SGA sizes (larger SGA for single-block read oriented databases like transactional/OLTP or OLAP cubes), but smaller SGA for smart scan/parallel scan oriented DWs. If you configure 40GB of hugepages on a node, but only use 1GB of SGA, then 39GB memory is just reserved, not used, wasted – as hugepages are pre-allocated. AMM, using regular pages, will only use the pages what it touches, so there’s no memory wastage due to any pre-allocation issues…

So, Oracle chose to use an approach which is more universal and doesn’t require extra OS level configuration (which isn’t hard at all though if you pay attention, but not all people do). So, less people will end up in trouble with their first deployments although they might not be getting the most out of their hardware.

However, before enabling hugepages “because it makes things faster” you should ask yourself what exact benefit would they bring you?

There are 3 main reasons why hugepages may be useful in Linux:

1) Smaller kernel memory usage thanks to less PTEs thanks to larger pagesizes

This means less pagetable entries (PTEs) and less kernel memory usage. The bigger your SGA and the more processes you have logged on, the bigger the memory usage.

You can measure this in your case – just “grep Page /proc/meminfo” and see how big portion of your RAM has been used by “PageTables”. Many people have blogged about this, but Kevin Closson’s blog is probably the best source to read about this:

2) Lower CPU usage due to less TLB misses in CPU and soft page-fault processing when accessing SGA.

It’s harder to measure this on Linux with standard tools, although it is sure possible (on Solaris you can just run prstat -m to get microstate accounting and look into TFL,DFL,TRP stats).

Anyway, the catch here is that if you are running parallel scans and smart scans, then you don’t access that much of buffer cache in SGA at all, all IOs or smart scan result-sets are read directly to PGAs of server processes – which don’t use large pages at all, regardless of whether hugepages for SGA have been configured or not. There are some special cases, like when a block clone has to be rolled back for read consistency, you’ll have to access some undo blocks via buffer cache… but again this should be a small part of total workload.

So, in a DW, which using mostly smarts scans or direct path reads, there won’t be much CPU efficiency win from large pages as you bypass buffer cache anyway and use small pages of private process memory. All the sorting, hashing etc all happens using small pages anyway. Again I have to mention that on (my favorite OS) Solaris it is possible to configure even PGAs to use large pages (via _realfree_heap_pagesize_hint parameter) … so it’ll be interesting to see how this would help DW workloads on the Exadata X2-8 monsters which can run Solaris 11.

3) Lock SGA pages into RAM so they won’t be paged out when memory shortage happens (for whatever reason).

Hugepages are pre-allocated and never paged out. So, when you have extreme memory shortage, your SGAs won’t be paged out “by accident”. Of course it’s better to ensure that such memory shortages won’t happen – configure the SGA/PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET sizes properly and don’t allow third party programs consume crazy amounts of memory etc. Of course there’s the lock_sga parameter in Oracle which should allow to do this on Linux with small pages too, but first I have never used it on Linux so I don’t know whether it works ok at all and also in 11g AMM perhaps the mlock() calls aren’t supported on the /dev/shm files at all (haven’t checked and don’t care – it’s better to stay away from extreme memory shortages). Read more about how the AMM MEMORY_TARGET (/dev/shm) works from my article written back in 2007 when 11g came out ( Oracle 11g internals – Automatic Memory Management ).

So, the only realistic win (for DW workload) would be the reduction of kernel pagetables structure size – and you can measure this using PageTables statistic in /proc/meminfo. Kevin demonistrated in his article that 500 connections to an instance with ~8 GB SGA consisting of small pages resulted in 7 GB of kernel pagetables usage, while the usage with large pages (still 500 connections, 8 GB SGA) was about 265 MB. So you could win over 6 GB of RAM, which you can then give to PGA_AGGREGATE_TARGET or to further inrease SGA. The more processes you have connected to Oracle, the more pagetable space is used… Similarly, the bigger the SGA is, the more pagetable space is used…

This is great, but the tradeoff here is manageability and some extra effort you have to put in to always check whether the large pages actually got used or not. After starting up your instance, you should really check whether the HugePages_Free in /proc/meminfo shrank and HugePages_Rsvd increased (when instance has just started up and Oracle hasn’t touched all the SGA pages yet, some pages will show up as Rsvd – reserved).

With a single instance per node this is trivial – you know how much SGA you want and pre-allocate the amount of hugepages for that. If you want to increase the SGA, you’ll have to shut down the instance and increase the Linux hugepages setting too. This can be done dynamically by issuing a command like echo N > /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages (where N is the number of huge pages), BUT in real life this may not work out well as if Linux kernel can’t free enough small pages from right physical RAM locations to consolidate 2 or 4 MB contiguous pages, the above command may fail to create the requested amount of new hugepages.

And this means you should restart the whole node to do the change. Note that if you increase your SGA larger to the number of hugepages (or you forget to increase the memlock setting in /etc/security/limits.conf accordingly) then your instance will silently just use the small pages, while all the memory pre-allocated for hugepages stays reserved for hugepages and is not usable for anything else!).

So, this may become more of a problem when you have multiple database instances per cluster node or you expect to start up and shut down instances on different nodes based on demand (or when some cluster nodes fail).

Long story short – I do configure hugepages in “static” production environments, to save kernel memory (and some CPU time for OLTP type environments using buffer cache heavily), also on Exadata. However for various test and development environments with lots of instances per server and constant action, I don’t bother myself (and the client) with hugepages and make everyone’s life easier… Small instances with small number of connections won’t use that many PTEs anyway…

For production environments with multiple database instances per node (and where failovers are expected) I would take the extra effort to ensure that whatever hugepages I have preallocated, won’t get silently wasted because an instance wants more SGA than the available hugepages can accommodate. You can do this by monitoring /proc/meminfo’s HugePage entries as explained above. And remember, the ASM instance (which is started before DB instances) will also grab itself some hugepages when it starts!

Expert Oracle Exadata book – Alpha chapters available for purchase!

Hi,

Apress has made the draft versions of our Expert Oracle Exadata book available for purchase.

How this works is:

  1. You purchase the “alpha” version of the Expert Oracle Exadata book
  2. You get the access to draft/alpha PDF versions of some chapters now!
  3. As more chapters will be added and existing ones updated, you’ll receive an email and you can download these too
  4. You will get a PDF copy of the final book once it’s out!

This is an awesome deal if you can’t wait until the final launch and want to get ahead of the curve with your Exadata skills ;-)

Buy the alpha version of our Expert Oracle Exadata book from Apress here!

If you haven’t heard about this book earlier – I’m one of the 3 authors, writing it together with Kerry Osborne and Randy Johnson from Enkitec and our official tech reviewer is no other than THE Kevin Closson and we are also getting some (unofficial) feedback from Oracle database junkie Arup Nanda.

So this book will absolutely rock and if you want a piece of it now, order the alpha book above!

P.S. This hopefully also explains why I’ve been so quiet with my blogging lately – can’t write a book and do many other things at the same time… (at least if you want to do it well…)

Performance Stories from Exadata Migrations

Here are my UKOUG 2010 slides about Exadata migration performance, this is real life stuff, not repeating the marketing material:
View more presentations from tanelp.