RE: Taking advantage of SSD Capabilities when Smart Flash Cache isn't an option?

  • From: "Mark W. Farnham" <mwf@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: <Christopher.Taylor2@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, <kevin.jernigan@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 29 May 2013 16:24:39 -0400

For modest sized clusters this is plausible if you control the applications. It 
does not scale and requires some special attention on your part only because 
temporary is bound to the user account instead of to the session.

IF temporary tablespace were bound to session (only defaulting to the temporary 
tablespace bound to the user, analogous to the default tablespace being used 
unless somewhere else is specified by the user), then you could create a login 
trigger such that you would alter your session to use as temporary some 
tablespace depending on your current instance's node location. Sadly this is 
one of the Oracle VLDB enhancement requests that did not get enough votes to be 
taken seriously by Oracle (some 58 of 63 vote winners were implemented by 7.1, 
the rest by 8.1 if memory serves - no complaints there! The only ones that were 
never implemented were supplanted by the revolution in Oracle's storage 
partition implementation.)

Okay end of whining (if it is not obvious, this was one of my personal 
requests. Two temps [so the merge runs could alternate sources and sinks on 
sorting, for example got even less far.])

The workaround is to create multiple users for each schema such that the users 
have all access (but use the schema user for all permanent creates to keep 
things clean) to everything, one user definition per node. (That is the part 
that is inconvenient to scale as it is all extra dictionary space. Of course 
you only use one user per instance, so it is not a big deal to the shared pool.)

Then each user has a temporary assignment for the node on which it should run. 
If the login "alter session temporary <temp designator>" trigger fails, it is 
up to you to take care of it or the default temporary tablespace would be used.

And it would be up to you to make sure you used user1 to connect to an instance 
on node1 so this is not compatible with some automatic failover/redirection to 
a secondary working node/instance schemes.
 
Now if you have NFS mounting, then you can mount the SSD r/w on its local node 
and read only on non-local nodes. In this manner you CAN use local SSD for 
online redo logs, arch destinations, diagnostic out, what have you that only 
needs to be writable locally but readable by, for example, alternate node 
application of a redo log.

Would support have a fit? I don't know. You probably should not call them to 
help you set up something like this, and if you do something that does not work 
it is probably your problem, but there is nothing inherently unsupported: It is 
read/write where it needs to be and anything that needs to read it can read it.

Good luck,

mwf

alter session default temporary TEMP1;
alter session secondary temporary TEMP2;

oh sweet if you want unchallenged and optimized  i/o performance of some single 
non-parallel task. Secondary would have to be 2N for parallel degree N with 
subcomponents sorting.

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On 
Behalf Of Christopher.Taylor2@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 12:52 PM
To: kevin.jernigan@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Taking advantage of SSD Capabilities when Smart Flash Cache isn't 
an option?

Ok, so it sounds like SSD have limitations on even being setup as shared 
devices.  I guess that makes sense as I think about it in more detail now.
Local HDs aren't easily sharable either so now I'm thinking my premise may be 
in error to begin with.

The SSDs wouldn't be coming from an array.  It would probably take an ugly hack 
to get the servers to see the SSD devices on each host and have them 
read/writeable from any host in the cluster.  So, not really a good option 
there then.

Chris

From: Kevin Jernigan [mailto:kevin.jernigan@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 11:46 AM
To: Taylor Christopher - Nashville
Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Taking advantage of SSD Capabilities when Smart Flash Cache isn't 
an option?

Ok, so if you're on 10g then Database Smart Flash Cache is out of the question 
- it was introduced in 11gR2. If the SSDs are set up as drives in a storage 
array, then they might be sharable - but we've seen several "all flash" arrays 
from various storage vendors, none of which can be mounted as shared storage, 
so you should check to be sure the SSDs are truly share-able, and that there 
aren't sneaky performance bottlenecks hiding in the storage controllers etc...KJ

Kevin Jernigan
(650) 607-0392 (o)
Senior Director Product Management
(415) 710-8828 (m)
kevin.jernigan@xxxxxxxxxx



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