pgbouncer and slow server pool increase

This post is about an issue I ran into when trying to use pgbouncer in front of Yugabyte YSQL, the postgres layer yugabyte reuses for handling relational data.

pgbouncer: https://www.pgbouncer.org

yugabyte: https://www.yugabyte.com

postgres: https://www.postgresql.org

The case for pgbouncer.

Pgbouncer is a connectionpool for postgres databases. It’s a process sitting in between the client and the actual postgres server, and separates clients from a postgres server connection by keeping a pool of connections from the clients (the socalled clients pool), and keeping a pool of connections to the postgres server (the socalled servers pool).

A postgres database connection is forked from the postmaster as an independent process when a client connects, and executes the queries on the client’s behalf. Creating a process is a timetaking and “costly” action for a computer system. The most ideal way of using postgres is to logon once with all the needed connections, and use and reuse these connections.

Sadly, a lot of database clients do not take using the database in the most ideal way into account, and perform database unfriendly connection management, such as creating and dropping connections really quick or creating an high amount of connections, or both.

pgbouncer helps in such cases with the aforementioned separation of clients and servers, and linking a client with a server connection based on the set pool mode, which can be session (a client uses a database connection for the duration of the session until disconnect), transaction (a client uses a database connection for the duration of a transaction) or statement (a client uses a database connection for each query).

The default setting for pool mode is session, based on testing it seems pgbouncer functions most optimal when using transaction mode, so (varying/huge numbers of) client connections can use a lower amount of (dedicated/steady) database connections.

The encountered issue.

I used a default Centos 8.3 image I created myself using packer, using vagrant and virtualbox. This means a lot of the machine configuration is default, using packer means the image is created using scripts. In other words: there was no configuration done by myself or someone else without me knowing it.

The server was functioning correctly, and added pgbouncer (pgbouncer is a package in EPEL), configured it and ran it. I configured pgbouncer to allow 1000 client connections (max_client_conn), and create 100 database connections (default_pool_size,min_pool_size). The way pgbouncer works is that the connections are not created when pgbouncer starts, but per database when a client requests the database from pgbouncer for the first time. I manually connected through pgbouncer and it functioned correctly. So far, so good.

Then I tested it with a synthetic load:

for n in $(1 200) do; ysqlsh -h localhost -p 6432 -c "select pg_sleep(60);" & done

What should happen is that all 200 connections get connected to pgbouncer, and pgbouncer creates 100 connections, to which 100 clients get connected and execute, and 100 clients should remain waiting to be serviced.

However, I noticed that there were only a couple of connections created to the database server, something like 2 or 3, and the amount was slowly increasing. It also lead to pgbouncer eventually killing the connections, because query_wait_timeout is set to 120 (seconds) by default, and with the low number of connections, some sessions do exceed that time waiting and thus are stopped by pgbouncer.

The investigation.

The first thing I did was google the issue. No hits that I could find that actually described my issue.

To validate why I couldn’t find this issue, I setup a machine with vanilla postgres and added pgbouncer to it with the same configuration and performed the same test. In that situation pgbouncer build the server connections really quick, and everything worked as I wanted it to work, meaning that pgbouncer connected all the client connections, and executed the queries using the statically set number of connections to the postgres server.

At that point I started thinking the modifications yugabyte made to the postgres layer might have an impact on this.

But it’s clear, I need additional information to understand where I needed to look.

Looking more deeply into the configuration of pgbouncer I found the option “verbose”, and set it to 5 to get more information, and ran the test against the yugabyte ysql server again. I found the following messages in the pgbouncer log:

2021-04-08 16:59:49.839 UTC [22773] DEBUG sbuf_after_connect_check: pending error: Connection refused

2021-04-08 16:59:49.839 UTC [22773] LOG S-0x563bd3657a80: yugabyte/yugabyte@[::1]:5433 closing because: connect failed (age=0s)

2021-04-08 16:59:49.839 UTC [22773] NOISE safe_close(35) = 0

2021-04-08 16:59:50.174 UTC [22773] DEBUG launching new connection to satisfy min_pool_size

2021-04-08 16:59:50.174 UTC [22773] DEBUG launch_new_connection: last failed, not launching new connection yet, still waiting 14 s

2021-04-08 16:59:50.505 UTC [22773] DEBUG launching new connection to satisfy min_pool_size

2021-04-08 16:59:50.505 UTC [22773] DEBUG launch_new_connection: last failed, not launching new connection yet, still waiting 14 s

2021-04-08 16:59:50.841 UTC [22773] DEBUG launching new connection to satisfy min_pool_size

2021-04-08 16:59:50.841 UTC [22773] DEBUG launch_new_connection: last failed, not launching new connection yet, still waiting 13 s

So pgbouncer encountered a connection refused error, and therefore closes/stops the attempt to add a connection, and then waits for 15 seconds before trying again. Why would it encounter a connection refused, which it didn’t encounter with vanilla postgres?

To be more practical, there also is a setting that allows tweaking the back-off time for the connection refused issue: server_login_retry. When I set it to 0, I still do get the error, but pgbouncer then builds up the server connections.

But it’s not very satisfactory to have this rather blunt workaround. I would like get the issue solved!

Looking deeper.

I decided I need to get this solved. Because this is a connection refused error, it’s logical to look at networking. A really good tool for this case is tcpdump. tcpdump allows (a superuser/root) to capture network traffic and visualise it. For the investigation, I setup the server to have no other connections to the database, pgbouncer freshly started so no connection are built up yet, and then connect to pgbouncer to trigger it to build the connections.

First regular postgres:

vagrant@localhost ~]$ sudo tcpdump -ttt -i lo -n port 5432

dropped privs to tcpdump

tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode

listening on lo, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 262144 bytes

IP 127.0.0.1.48366 > 127.0.0.1.postgres: Flags [S], seq 952020725, win 43690, options [mss 65495,sackOK,TS val 3901196965 ecr 0,nop,wscale 6], length 0

IP 127.0.0.1.postgres > 127.0.0.1.48366: Flags [S.], seq 3702813748, ack 952020726, win 43690, options [mss 65495,sackOK,TS val 3901196965 ecr 3901196965,nop,wscale 6], length 0

IP 127.0.0.1.48366 > 127.0.0.1.postgres: Flags [.], ack 1, win 683, options [nop,nop,TS val 3901196965 ecr 3901196965], length 0

IP 127.0.0.1.48366 > 127.0.0.1.postgres: Flags [P.], seq 1:9, ack 1, win 683, options [nop,nop,TS val 3901197012 ecr 3901196965], length 8

IP 127.0.0.1.postgres > 127.0.0.1.48366: Flags [.], ack 9, win 683, options [nop,nop,TS val 3901197012 ecr 3901197012], length 0

IP 127.0.0.1.postgres > 127.0.0.1.48366: Flags [P.], seq 1:2, ack 9, win 683, options [nop,nop,TS val 3901197012 ecr 3901197012], length 1

IP 127.0.0.1.48366 > 127.0.0.1.postgres: Flags [.], ack 2, win 683, options [nop,nop,TS val 3901197012 ecr 3901197012], length 0

IP 127.0.0.1.48366 > 127.0.0.1.postgres: Flags [P.], seq 9:98, ack 2, win 683, options [nop,nop,TS val 3901197012 ecr 3901197012], length 89

IP 127.0.0.1.postgres > 127.0.0.1.48366: Flags [P.], seq 2:15, ack 98, win 683, options [nop,nop,TS val 3901197013 ecr 3901197012], length 13

IP 127.0.0.1.48366 > 127.0.0.1.postgres: Flags [P.], seq 98:139, ack 15, win 683, options [nop,nop,TS val 3901197013 ecr 3901197013], length 41

IP 127.0.0.1.postgres > 127.0.0.1.48366: Flags [P.], seq 15:342, ack 139, win 683, options [nop,nop,TS val 3901197014 ecr 3901197013], length 327

IP 127.0.0.1.48366 > 127.0.0.1.postgres: Flags [.], ack 342, win 700, options [nop,nop,TS val 3901197053 ecr 3901197014], length 0

In essence there isn’t much noteworthy to see. The first 3 packets are the TCP 3-way handshake, after which we see pgbouncer and postgres getting the connection ready at the other layers.

Now yugabyte:

[vagrant@centos83-yb-1 ~]$ sudo tcpdump -ttt -i lo -n port 5433

dropped privs to tcpdump

tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode

listening on lo, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 262144 bytes

IP 127.0.0.1.37500 > 127.0.0.1.pyrrho: Flags [S], seq 2745440791, win 43690, options [mss 65495,sackOK,TS val 1151235630 ecr 0,nop,wscale 7], length 0

IP 127.0.0.1.pyrrho > 127.0.0.1.37500: Flags [S.], seq 2754397962, ack 2745440792, win 43690, options [mss 65495,sackOK,TS val 1151235630 ecr 1151235630,nop,wscale 7], length 0

IP 127.0.0.1.37500 > 127.0.0.1.pyrrho: Flags [.], ack 1, win 342, options [nop,nop,TS val 1151235630 ecr 1151235630], length 0

IP 127.0.0.1.37500 > 127.0.0.1.pyrrho: Flags [P.], seq 1:42, ack 1, win 342, options [nop,nop,TS val 1151235630 ecr 1151235630], length 41

IP 127.0.0.1.pyrrho > 127.0.0.1.37500: Flags [.], ack 42, win 342, options [nop,nop,TS val 1151235630 ecr 1151235630], length 0

IP 127.0.0.1.pyrrho > 127.0.0.1.37500: Flags [P.], seq 1:332, ack 42, win 342, options [nop,nop,TS val 1151235755 ecr 1151235630], length 331

IP 127.0.0.1.37500 > 127.0.0.1.pyrrho: Flags [.], ack 332, win 350, options [nop,nop,TS val 1151235756 ecr 1151235755], length 0

IP6 ::1.43518 > ::1.pyrrho: Flags [S], seq 2042629123, win 43690, options [mss 65476,sackOK,TS val 2150324005 ecr 0,nop,wscale 7], length 0

IP6 ::1.pyrrho > ::1.43518: Flags [R.], seq 0, ack 2042629124, win 0, length 0

Yugabyte works at port 5433, which tcpdump translates as ‘pyrrho’. Here too the 3-way handshake is visible. And then pgbouncer and yugabyte chatting, until…a packet is sent using IP6 ?!? The packet is sent to the ‘pyrrho’ port, so it means the client (pgbouncer) must be doing this. Quite correctly the server responds to the IP6 packet by telling it the port is not in use (‘R’: reset). That actually fits with what the pgbouncer logging told us.

The solution.

At his point I knew somehow IPv6 (IP6) got involved. It probably has to do with name resolving, because that fits a scenario where something might “spontaneously” resolve as IPv6. And since it’s localhost, it’s not logical this is DNS, this must be something that is local on the machine. Well, if it’s name to address resolving and it can’t be DNS, the most logical thing would be the /etc/hosts file!

Apparently, with a Centos 8 standard installation, localhost is defined in the following way in /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1 localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost4.localdomain6

And because ‘::1’, the IPv6 address, is the second one, that is the one localhost will resolve to:

ping -c 1 localhost
PING localhost(localhost (::1)) 56 data bytes
64 bytes from localhost (::1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.024 ms

Well, then the solution to fully solve this would be really simple: remove the IPv6 / ::1 line from /etc/hosts. I did that, and indeed, there is no ‘connection refused’ anymore! Problem solved!

My reasons for moving to Yugabyte

I am excited to announce that I have accepted a role at Yugabyte as ‘developer advocate’. It’s not easy to leave the talented group of people that is Enkitec, of which many of them I call friends. In fact, the change is much bigger since Yugabyte is a database outside of the Oracle ecosystem, in which ecosystem there also are a lot of people that I have gotten to known and call friends.

So why the change? In essence, my reasons are the same as the ones Bryn Llewellyn mentioned in his blogpost about his move, although I come from a different background being a consultant and not working for Oracle.

Open source

You could argue that having spend investigating the inner working of the Oracle database for 20 or so years means I am discarding all this knowledge I build up. I don’t believe that’s true. Yes, I have build up a lot of knowledge about the Oracle database works, and parts of that knowledge might be known (usable?) to a small group. However, I am looking forward to working with software for which I can actually see how it’s made, and I don’t have to perform extensive research to figure out how it’s “probably” implemented. This is an important reason for me personally. In general I think there are much more reasons for companies for wanting to use open source software instead of proprietary, closed source software.

Distributed architecture & distributed SQL

The area I have spend a significant amount of time in, is assessing and investigating performance of the Oracle database. Oracle, like many traditional monolithic databases, use an architecture where the database itself is actually a single set of files containing the data, which is singular, and are served by processes that perform validation of requests to use that data, and perform performance features like caching so data can be used from memory, which means it doesn’t need to be re-read from the files so it can be served at memory latency. This architecture imposes limits on the scale of use, for which common solutions to overcome these limits with monolithic architectures are:
– Sharing the (still singular) datafiles with multiple machines (RAC).
– Make a copy of the data files, and spool the changes to the copy (DG/OGG/replication).
– (Manually) partition the data over multiple independent databases (sharding).
– Storing data redundantly over the available (still local) disks (RAID).
I am not saying these solutions are wrong. In fact, many of them are very cleverly architected and optimized over the years with the different architectures of databases and work really well.
However, there are a consequences that are inherently imposed by a monolithic architecture, such as scalability, flexibility and failure resistance.

The Yugabyte database provides a cloud ready, cloud vendor agnostic, failure resistant, linear scaling database (sorry for the abundance of hype words). Failure resistance is provided by keeping multiple copies of the data, which is configurable as ‘replication factor’. By keeping copies of the data, failure of a single Yugabyte node (called a ‘tablet server’) can be overcome. By spreading these copies of data over groups of tablet servers in cloud availability zones, the outage of an entire availability zone can be survived. When such a disaster strikes, the cluster will survive and provide normal (read and write functions) as long as 2/3rd of the nodes survive (in case of a replication factor of 3), without the need for any management to accommodate failover, like instantiating a replica/standby.

Each Yugabyte tablet server also serves as an API for data retrieval and manipulation, so with the addition of tablet servers, the processing power increases. A tablet server should use local, non-protected disks to take advantage of low latency, and by adding more tablet servers the work can be spread out further to these, increasing the amount of work that can be done. Aside from increasing processing for API-side processing, Yugabyte provides functionality which pushes down the work to the storage, which Exadata specialists will recognize as ‘smart scans’, alongside things like predicate pushdown and bloom filters.

Yugabyte has not invented yet another SQL and/or no-SQL dialect. Another point that I think is really strong is that Yugabyte reuses Postgresql as the SQL API. The Postgres API is “wire compatible” with Postgres, which means that any product that can talk to a Postgres database can talk to Yugabyte. In fact, instead of writing a Postgres layer, Yugabyte has re-used the Postgres source to use the query layers of postgres, and then provide the storage for postgres using Yugabyte. This also means a lot of the server side functionality of Postgres, such as PL/pgSQL can be used. Needless to say there are limitations inherent to the postgres connection with the Yugabyte storage layer, but most common postgres database functionality is available.

But that is not all! Aside and in parallel to Yugabyte’s Postgres API, it also provides a “NoSQL” APIs, which are compatible with Apache Cassandra and with Redis. Oh, and data storage is done via LSM (log-structured merge-tree), etc.

Conclusion

I hope at this point you can see that Yugabyte provides a fresh, modern approach to a database that provides a lot of advantages over more traditional, monolithic databases, for which I think a lot of cases that I witnessed over the years could significantly benefit from (performance-wise and availability-wise). I am really thrilled to be on the basis of building that further.

Also, a lot of technical reasons that I described are really just a summary, if you have gotten interested or want to learn more, I would urge you (or challenge you :-D) to have a look at https://www.yugabyte.com or read more at https://docs.yugabyte.com. Or if you want to see the code, head over to https://github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db!

Hashicorp vagrant and the Vagrantfiles.

This post is about a fully documented but easy to miss feature of vagrant, which is the evaluation of the Vagrantfiles when a vagrant ‘box’ is started. As you can see, I wrote ‘Vagrantfiles’, which is plural. I (very naively) thought that the Vagrantfile in the directory where you want to start the ‘box’ determines the specifics of the vagrant ‘box’.

This begins with me trying to create a vagrant virtualbox VM using packer, where I specify a Vagrantfile during the packer build. I normally don’t spend a lot of thought on that, and just put in a very simple Vagrantfile, essentially just defining the box and setting memory and cpu amounts.

In this case, I decided to put in the Vagrantfile that I wanted to use for this special purpose ‘box’ as the Vagrantfile for the packer build, which has some ruby in it which adds a disk:

data1_disk = "data1.vdi"
if !File.exist?(data1_disk)
  vb.customize [ 'createhd', '--filename', data1_disk, '--size', 20480 ]
end
vb.customize [ 'storageattach', :id, '--storagectl', 'SATA Controller', '--port', 2, '--device', 0, '--type', 'hdd', '--medium', data1_disk ]

My (wrong) assumption was that this Vagrantfile was kept as a validation or template.

After the box was created, I tested running it, and therefore I copied the Vagrantfile including the above addition of checking for a file, if it doesn’t exist creating it, and then attaching the disk to the VM. However, this did fail with an error in the provisioning stage that a disk was already added, and therefore could not be added again.

I didn’t understand the error when I first encountered it, so I investigated the issue by removing the box (vagrant destroy), and commenting out the disk addition code (the above 5 lines) from the Vagrantfile, and then run the box addition again (vagrant up). Much to my surprise, it did add the disk for which I explicitly removed the code that provided that functionality.

This severely puzzled me.

After going over the vagrant documentation and searching for the error messages, I found out that the Vagrantfile embedded with the ‘box’ is actually used, and parsed, along with the user specified Vagrantfile, and the contents of both are merged before a vagrant ‘box’ is started. This Vagrantfile can be seen in the directory which holds the zipped boxes after downloading from app.vagrantup.com. On my Mac this is ‘~/.vagrant.d/boxes/{box name}/{version}/{provider}/Vagrantfile’.

This perfectly explained what I witnessed: because the disk creation steps are in the ’embedded’ Vagrantfile, it will simply be executed, even if it’s not in the normal Vagrantfile. And of course it threw an error when the disk creation steps were added to the normal Vagrantfile, because then these steps were executed twice, which would show at the vb.customize ‘storageattach’ execution, because that is not protected by a check, so the second occurrence would be tried and fails.

This was really my ignorance, and maybe a bit the documentation not being overly verbose about the existence of more than one Vagrantfile. It also gives great opportunities: lots of steps or logic that would normally be in the Vagrantfile could be put in the embedded Vagrantfile so that regular Vagrantfile can be kept really simple.

Conclusion is that if you create vagrant boxes yourself, when you want to perform provisioning steps against a vagrant box that simply need to be done, you might as well put them in the embedded Vagrantfile.

Oracle database reliable message waits

This blog is about the oracle database wait event ‘reliable message’. It should be noted that normally, this should not be a prominent wait, and if it does so, the most logical cause would be something that is not working as it should, either by oversubscribing something or simply because of a bug.

The reliable message note on My Oracle Support provides a good description:
https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocContentDisplay?_afrLoop=34595019638128&id=69088.1&_afrWindowMode=0&_adf.ctrl-state=15ief27plw_97

It does tell something about what a reliable message is:
– A message send using the KSR intra-instance broadcast service.
– The message publisher waits on this wait event until all subscribers have consumed the message.
– The publisher waits for up to one second and then retests if all subscribers have consumed the message.

So the first thing to establish is that a reliable message means that the publisher of the message does wait for all subscribers of the channel it published its message on to have finished consuming the message. That is what ‘reliable’ means with reliable message: all subscribers are guaranteed to have consumed the message. Not all messages in the Oracle executable are ‘reliable’; if you take the log writer notification during redo generation in kcrfw_redo_gen_ext>kcrf_commit_force_int for example, it will only signal the log writer if it isn’t signalled before in the first place, and if it does, it’s just a nudge for the log writer to start its task, there is nothing stateful about the message and in the message itself, like an SCN to write up to.

The second thing to think about is that the KSR/reliable message mechanism to my knowledge itself does not suffer from issues or widespread bugs. This means that, for what I’ve seen (for what that’s worth :-D), the KSR code for reliable messaging is unlikely to be an issue itself if you see this event. It is probably the function of the message that the KSR code is trying to publish on the channel to its subscribers that is causing the reliable message wait.

For this to dive deeper into, I first need to restate what I’ve said at the beginning: in order to sensibly investigate long times spend in a wait event, any wait event really, the very first thing you need to look for is if the system the database is running on is functioning in a normal way. In other words: if the issue you see being represented by a wait event is not an issue outside of the database, for which the database has made your work easier because it has timed the manifestation of the issue outside of the database for you, instead of being an issue inside the database.

For the reliable message to be investigated, you need to understand the logic of reliable messaging in the oracle database. Let me take a truncate table as an example; a ‘truncate table ‘ requires the current blocks to be written to disk. To do that, it sends a reliable message to the checkpointer via the ‘kcbo’ channel, for which the description is ‘obj broadcast channel’ channel.

If you freeze the checkpointer process, it will not be able to do anything, and thus it cannot consume the message that is send by the process that executes a truncate. One way of freezing a process is to attach to it with a debugger, like gdb. Of course this only ever should be done in a test environment and not in production, because freezing (background) processes can have all kinds of bad side effects, and it will almost certainly influence anything else that is done.

If you look at the truncating process, you will see the wait event ‘reliable message’. Take the p1 value from the waiting process and execute the following SQL:

-- replace <p1> with the p1 value of the reliable message wait event
select des.id_ksrcdes, des.name_ksrcdes
from x$ksrcctx ctx, x$ksrcdes des 
where to_number(ctx.addr,'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX') = <p1> 
and ctx.name_ksrcctx = des.indx;

This shows the channel and the description of the channel the reliable message is waiting for:

ID_KSRCDES                        NAME_KSRCDES
--------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------
kcbo                              obj broadcast channel

To understand more you can use the x$ksrchdl view and link these with the publishers and subscribers of the channel context:

-- inspired by and largely taken from Tanel Poder's channels2.sql script (https://github.com/tanelpoder/tpt-oracle/blob/master/channel2.sql)
-- replace <p1> with the p1 value of the reliable message wait event
select case when bitand(c.flags_ksrchdl,1)=1 then 'PUB ' end || 
       case when bitand(c.flags_ksrchdl,2)=2 then 'SUB ' end || 
       case when bitand(c.flags_ksrchdl,16)=16 then 'INA ' end flags,
       s.sid,
       p.program,
       cd.name_ksrcdes channel_name, 
       cd.id_ksrcdes, 
       c.ctxp_ksrchdl
from   x$ksrchdl c , 
       v$process p, 
       v$session s, 
       x$ksrcctx ctx, 
       x$ksrcdes cd
where 1=1
and to_number(c.ctxp_ksrchdl,'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX') = <p1>
and s.paddr(+)=c.owner_ksrchdl 
and p.addr(+)=c.owner_ksrchdl
and c.ctxp_ksrchdl=ctx.addr
and cd.indx=ctx.name_ksrcctx
;

In my case, this shows the following information:

FLAGS          SID PROGRAM                                                      CHANNEL_NAME                             ID_KSRCDES CTXP_KSRCHDL
------------ ----- ------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- ---------- ----------------
SUB            258 oracle@oracle-database.local (CKPT)                          obj broadcast channel                    kcbo       000000007AAB3020
PUB            141 oracle@oracle-database.local (M001)                          obj broadcast channel                    kcbo       000000007AAB3020
PUB            142 oracle@oracle-database.local (W005)                          obj broadcast channel                    kcbo       000000007AAB3020
PUB            145 oracle@oracle-database.local (W007)                          obj broadcast channel                    kcbo       000000007AAB3020
PUB            396 oracle@oracle-database.local (TNS V1-V3)                     obj broadcast channel                    kcbo       000000007AAB3020

The important bit here is that this channel; “kcbo” has 4 publishers (“my” session, and the background processes M001, W005 and W007) and one subscriber: CKPT, the checkpoint processes. In this case, the information about the process we are waiting for could be guessed, not only because I caused the waiting situation myself, but because the “final_blocking_session” field in v$session would point you to it. But in the case of multiple subscribers, you can use this query to find all the processes that are currently participating in the channel.

A subscribing session essentially does 3 things of importance to the reliable message wait:
1. It finds a published message in the channel it is subscribed to, and starts acting on the message.
2. It performs the task or tasks that should be done as a subscriber to that channel.
3. It ‘consumes’ the message, leading to end the reliable message wait event for the publisher.

In the case of a truncate, the foreground process executing the truncate finds the handle, adds itself as publisher to the handle, adds the message and then posts the subscriber(s) using ‘semop’ to activate them. Then it goes into a function called ‘ksrpubwait_ctx’, and waits for the subscribers to do their work in the ‘reliable message’ wait event. The wait is implemented as a semaphore wait (semtimedop) with a 1 second timeout, as the MOS note indicates.

The subscriber, which is the checkpointer process, will be woken from its semtimedop “sleep” if idle, and goes off performing its work cycle. One of the calls in the checkpointer work cycle is ksb_act_run>ksb_act_run_int>kcbo_subch, which performs the task of inspecting the kcbo “KSR channel” to see if work is published.

If so, it performs the task of setting the RO enqueues and add a checkpoint to the checkpoint queue of type 10: object reuse checkpoint and post the logwriter, after which the checkpointer is done, which means it will post the publisher.

Once the publisher is posted, which is the foreground, it will stop waiting for the ‘reliable message’ wait event, and continue on working. Depending on the speed of all the processes and lots of other things, the next thing that happens might be that the foreground now will try to uniquely obtain the RO enqueues and will not be able to do that, or the background processes might have finished their work and released the RO enqueues. But these dealings are not the point of this blogpost.

What I do hope you understand when you’ve reached this part, is that the ‘reliable message’ event is part of the database infrastructure that serves different functions, and that you should look into the specific function for which the KSR infrastructure is used instead of the KSR infrastructure itself.

Oracle database processes and waiting long in the supermarket

Hopefully I got your interest by the weird name of this blogpost. This blogpost is about sensible usage of an Oracle database. Probably, there are a lot of blog posts like this, but I need to get this off my chest.

A quote any starwars fan would recognise is ‘I sense a disturbance in the force’. I do, and I have felt it for a long time. This disturbance is the usage of the number of connections for a database. Because of my profession, this is the oracle database, but this really applies to the server-side of any client/server server processor running on at least (but probably not limited to) intel Xeon processors.

The disturbance is the oversubscription or sometimes even excessive oversubscription of database connections from application servers, or any other means of database processes that acts as clients. This means this does not exclude parallel query processes, in other words: this applies to parallel query processes too.

What is oversubscription of database connections? Any good consultant would be able to tell you this: it depends. In principle, oversubscription means more subscribers than a system can handle. This means ‘oversubscription’ is a multidimensional beast, which can apply to CPU, memory, disk IO, network IO. That makes it hard.

This blogpost is about CPU oversubscription. The way a modern CPU, Intel Xeon in this case, works is not simple, and thus this will and cannot be an exhaustive description. What I want to try is provide a basic, simplistic description to provide an idea and give guidance.

An Intel Xeon CPU provides a number of processing units, called ‘processor’ in /proc/cpuinfo, called ‘cpu’ in the top utility, etc, which are the execution contexts for processes. These execution contexts can be hyperthreads, which for Intel Xeon are two threads per core, or an execution context for a single core. Not all Xeon CPUs provide hyperthreading, and hyperthreading, if available in the CPU, can be disabled in a system’s BIOS. A hyperthread can not, and does not do any processing, that is what a core does.

So why do hyperthreads exist then? I think two prominent reasons are:
1. Not all processes are active all the time. By increasing the number of execution contexts, the switching for processes between execution contexts is reduced, which means a reduction of time spend on context switches.
2. Cores are incredibly powerful, and given that probably not all processes are active all the time, combining two processes on the same core will be “reasonably unnoticeable”.

The next question which then comes to mind is: is hyperthreading a good thing for a database? I cannot give an exhaustive answer for this, partially because there is massive difference between system usage for different types of database usage. I would say that with reasonable usage, hyperthreading in modern Intel Xeon CPUs does provide more benefits, reduced context switching, than it gives downsides, like variances in latency of CPU usage.

This means that for looking at the CPU processing power of a database server the ‘actual’ processing power sits logically between the number of core’s and the number of threads. But wait! Didn’t I just say that threads don’t process, only core’s do? Yes, but let me explain how I look at this: if your processes do processing requiring ACTUAL, ON CPU processing, it means they depend on the core to be able to handle this, versus processes that work by running into waiting really quickly, like doing disk IO, network IO or waiting for users to make them active, which still might appear as running all the time, but in reality are actually processing on the core occasionally.

The first type, doing the actual, on cpu processing should calculate CPU power more towards core count, and the second type, doing lots of stalls, should calculate CPU more towards thread count. Overall, this is quite simply about using a core as efficient as possible.

Now that we gone through CPUs and their cores and threads, and oversubscription in general, the next question is: so how much processes should be allocated on a database server?

The answer is simple: if you want a high performing database for your application servers, the number of processes IN TOTAL should not exceed a number sitting somewhere between CPU core count and CPU thread count.

“Isn’t that incredibly low?”

Yes, for most of the deployments that I see this would be shockingly low. But just because the number of processes is set very high somewhere doesn’t make it right. It just means it’s set that way.

“But why is it set too high everywhere?”

I don’t know. I don’t understand why lots and lots of people do allocate high, up to sometimes ASTRONOMICAL numbers of database processes, and then expect that to be the best tuned way, while there is NO LOGICAL EXPLANATION that I can see for this to make sense. In fact: the explanation why this doesn’t make sense is this blogpost.

To make the comparison with a supermarket and the number of tills: if you go shopping in a supermarket and want to pay and leave as soon as possible, there should be a ready, idle till available, or else you have to wait. For Intel Xeon hyperthreading, you could make the comparison with a till that serves two lanes with persons that want to pay at the same time, because it takes time to put all the items from the shopping basket onto the desk, and the more time that takes, the more efficient a till serving two lanes would be (an Intel Xeon CPU can actually serve two threads at the same time, optimising runtime on the single core).

“Okay, but the majority of the processes is not actually doing anything.”

Well, if the processes are actually not doing anything, why have them in the first place? If that is really true, it doesn’t make sense to have them. And don’t forget: what looks like an idle connection from both an application and a database perspective still is an actual live, running operating system process, and a running database process that has memory allocated, occupies a network socket, has breakable parse locks out, etc, and requires CPU time to maintain the connection.

In fact, by having huge numbers of database connections, you have setup the application to be able to cause “the perfect storm” on the database!

With this, I mean that what I normally see, is that indeed the majority of the database connections are not used. However… if things get worse, and the database gets active and starts lacking CPU processing power, more database connections get active. That is logical, right? The database connections that normally would be active will take longer time because of the increased activity, so with a constant amount of work, new work cannot use an existing connection because that is still active, and thus take another connection that normally would sit idle. However, serving more connections will increase the amount of CPU required even further, which was already lacking, so the waiting time increases further. Now because the waiting time gets higher, more connections are needed, etc.

And then I didn’t talk about dynamically increasing connection pools!

What I mean with that is that I until now talked about STATIC connection pools. Static means the minimal number of connections is the maximal number of connections in the pool. A dynamic connection pool will have a certain amount of connections, and when there is a need for more, which means all the connections are busy, add more connections.

Especially with Oracle, this is really a bad idea. Let me explain. Outside of too much connections in the first place, which is a bad idea already, having an expanding connection pool means not only idle connections are put to work, but instead the database is given EVEN MORE work by initialising new connections. An oracle database connection is not lightweight, it requires initialising memory, which is an expensive operation. And the whole reason the connection is created is because the connection pool established all the connections were busy, which almost certainly is because the database was busy (!!!!).

I hope a lot of people will make it to the end, and then realise that high numbers of connections does not make any sense. If you do have an explanation that makes sense, please comment. Please mind that a tuned setup requires an application server to be reasonably setup too, you cannot have one part setup for ultimate processing power, and another part be just a shipwreck.

What’s new with Oracle database 11.2.0.4.200714 versus 11.2.0.4.201020

This blogpost takes a look at the technical differences between Oracle database 11.2.0.4 PSU 200714 (july 2020) and PSU 201020 (october 2020). This gives technical specialists an idea of the differences, and gives them the ability to assess if the PSU impacts anything.

Functions

code symbol names unique in version 11.2.0.4.200714 versus 11.2.0.4.201020

NAME                                                         RESOLVE                                            ANNOTATION                                                                                 ARCHIVE_OBJECT
------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------
kglrfSetNiv                                                  (kgl)rfSetNiv                                      kernel generic library cache management ??                                                 libgeneric11.a:kgl2.o

code symbol names unique in version 11.2.0.4.201020 versus 11.2.0.4.200714

NAME                                                         RESOLVE                                            ANNOTATION                                                                                 ARCHIVE_OBJECT
------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------
__init_0.0                                                   __init_0.0                                         ??
jox_get_cbrls_lock                                           (jox)_get_cbrls_lock                               java jit compiler ??
kglNivHTComp                                                 (kgl)NivHTComp                                     kernel generic library cache management ??                                                 libgeneric11.a:kgl2.o
kglNivHTHash                                                 (kgl)NivHTHash                                     kernel generic library cache management ??                                                 libgeneric11.a:kgl2.o
kglrfAddNivHT                                                (kgl)rfAddNivHT                                    kernel generic library cache management ??                                                 libgeneric11.a:kgl2.o
kglrfDestroyNivHT                                            (kgl)rfDestroyNivHT                                kernel generic library cache management ??                                                 libgeneric11.a:kgl2.o
kglrfSetNivHT                                                (kgl)rfSetNivHT                                    kernel generic library cache management ??                                                 libgeneric11.a:kgl2.o
next_marker                                                  (n)ext_marker                                      network ??                                                                                 libjavavm11.a:jdmarker.o
slrac_end_lock                                               (slrac)_end_lock                                   operating system (dependent) library verify (memory) read access ??                        libgeneric11.a:slrac.o

This is a poor, yet one of the only ways, to understand what is going on inside the oracle executable.
There aren’t that many things removed or added. Of course this is version 11.2.0.4, for which this PSU might be the last one because of 11.2.0.4’s expiring extended support state.

Quite striking here too is the absence of all the changed libjava related functions, for which I don’t know if these function additions have anything to do with security. However, please mind I am not implying that this is not secure, I simply can’t tell.

For the added and removed functions for this version: the only function that was added in version 12.1.0.2 is slrac_end_lock, all the other changes to functions seem to be completely unique to version 11.2.0.4.
If you did read all the functions closely, you might have seen that actually there was one libjava related function changed, and that my name resolving showed its limitations, because it marked it as ‘network’. Well, it seems that certain things, like the java functions do not follow the oracle database layered naming by letters approach.
It also seems that for adding and removing functions, the functions are mainly library cache (kgl) related.

In the data dictionary there weren’t any changes spotted. Of course this overview focusses on availability of parameters and metadata (tables and their columns), for a look into the data dictionary you should look at the work of my colleague Rodrigo Jorge (dissecting the 201020 patches)

What’s new with Oracle database 12.1.0.2.200714 versus 12.1.0.2.201020

This blogpost takes a look at the technical differences between Oracle database 12.1.0.2 PSU 200714 (july 2020) and PSU 201020 (october 2020). This gives technical specialists an idea of the differences, and gives them the ability to assess if the PSU impacts anything.

Functions

code symbol names unique in version 12.1.0.2.200714 versus 12.1.0.2.201020

NAME                                                         RESOLVE                                            ANNOTATION                                                                                 ARCHIVE_OBJECT
------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------
defCtx_GetRngCtx                                             defCtx_GetRngCtx                                   ??                                                                                         libnnzst12.a:ext_ztrsaadapter.o,libnnz12.a:ztrsaadapter.o
kgiflpop                                                     (kgi)flpop                                         kernel generic instantiation manager ??                                                    libgeneric12.a:kgi.o
kkfdGetQueReason                                             (kkfd)GetQueReason                                 kernel compile fast dataflow (PQ DFO) ??                                                   libserver12.a:kkfd.o
kkodpCheckPrefetch                                           (kkodp)CheckPrefetch                               kernel compile optimizer AQP ??                                                            libserver12.a:kkodp.o
kkodpHJLegal                                                 (kkodp)HJLegal                                     kernel compile optimizer AQP ??                                                            libserver12.a:kkodp.o
kkogimpCheckIMCValidity                                      (kko)gimpCheckIMCValidity                          kernel compile optimizer ??                                                                libserver12.a:kkoop.o
knasnblp2                                                    (knas)nblp2                                        kernel replication apply server ??                                                         libserver12.a:knasn.o
krvxuc                                                       (krvx)uc                                           kernel redo recovery extract ??                                                            libserver12.a:krvx.o
ksfd_estimate_fobpools                                       (ksfd)_estimate_fobpools                           kernel service functions disk IO ??                                                        libserver12.a:ksfd.o
ktcnq_get_typesize                                           (ktc)nq_get_typesize                               kernel transaction control component ??                                                    libserver12.a:ktcnq.o
ktuTempAddExtent_swcbk                                       (ktu)TempAddExtent_swcbk                           kernel transaction undo ??                                                                 libserver12.a:ktu.o
ztchmd5m                                                     (zt)chmd5m                                         security encryption ??                                                                     libnnzst12.a:ext_ztchmd5.o,libnnz12.a:ztchmd5.o
ztcriv                                                       (zt)criv                                           security encryption ??                                                                     libnnzst12.a:ext_ztcr.o,libnnz12.a:ztcr.o
ztcrsg                                                       (zt)crsg                                           security encryption ??                                                                     libnnzst12.a:ext_ztcr.o,libnnz12.a:ztcr.o

code symbol names unique in version 12.1.0.2.201020 versus 12.1.0.2.200714

NAME                                                         RESOLVE                                            ANNOTATION                                                                                 ARCHIVE_OBJECT
------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------
kcbo_exam_buf                                                (kcbo)_exam_buf                                    kernel cache buffers object queue ??                                                       libserver12.a:kcbo.o
kgnfs_isstaterenewal                                         (kgnfs)_isstaterenewal                             kernel generic network file system ??                                                      libgeneric12.a:kgnfs.o
kjbrnd2dummy                                                 (kjbr)nd2dummy                                     kernel lock management global cache service resource table ??                              libserver12.a:kjbr.o
kkfd_par_all                                                 (kkfd)_par_all                                     kernel compile fast dataflow (PQ DFO) ??                                                   libserver12.a:kkfd.o
kkqjpdClearFroCtx                                            (kkqjpd)ClearFroCtx                                kernel compile query  join analysis predicate push down ??                                 libserver12.a:kkqjpd.o
kksResetPMONSessionState                                     (kks)ResetPMONSessionState                         kernel compile shared objects (cursor) ??                                                  libserver12.a:kks1.o
knasnblp2l                                                   (knas)nblp2l                                       kernel replication apply server ??                                                         libserver12.a:knasn.o
knasnblp2lr                                                  (knas)nblp2lr                                      kernel replication apply server ??                                                         libserver12.a:knasn.o
kokaugi_iobs                                                 (koka)ugi_iobs                                     kernel objects kernel side access ??                                                       libserver12.a:koka.o
krvxpcls                                                     (krvx)pcls                                         kernel redo recovery extract ??                                                            libserver12.a:krvx.o
ktuAddTrsp                                                   (ktu)AddTrsp                                       kernel transaction undo ??                                                                 libserver12.a:ktu.o
ktuFindTrsp                                                  (ktu)FindTrsp                                      kernel transaction undo ??                                                                 libserver12.a:ktu.o
ktuGetTseg                                                   (ktu)GetTseg                                       kernel transaction undo ??                                                                 libserver12.a:ktu.o
ktuTempsoClnUp_pdcbk                                         (ktu)TempsoClnUp_pdcbk                             kernel transaction undo ??                                                                 libserver12.a:ktu.o
ktuTempsoClnUp_single                                        (ktu)TempsoClnUp_single                            kernel transaction undo ??                                                                 libserver12.a:ktu.o
nzosGetCipherDetails                                         (nz)osGetCipherDetails                             network security ??                                                                        libnnz12.a:ext_nzos.o,libnnzst12.a:ext_nzos.o
nzosGetCipherDetails2                                        (nz)osGetCipherDetails2                            network security ??                                                                        libnnz12.a:ext_nzos.o,libnnzst12.a:ext_nzos.o
nzosGetCipherList                                            (nz)osGetCipherList                                network security ??                                                                        libnnz12.a:ext_nzos.o,libnnzst12.a:ext_nzos.o
nzosGetDefaultCipherlist                                     (nz)osGetDefaultCipherlist                         network security ??                                                                        libnnz12.a:ext_nzos.o,libnnzst12.a:ext_nzos.o
qksceCEContainerMismatch                                     (qksce)CEContainerMismatch                         query kernel sql cursor evaluation ??                                                      libserver12.a:qksce.o
slrac_end_lock                                               (slrac)_end_lock                                   operating system (dependent) library verify (memory) read access ??                        libgeneric12.a:slrac.o

This is a poor, yet one of the only ways, to understand what is going on inside the oracle executable.
There aren’t that many things removed or added. Of course this is version 12.1, which is not what I believe to be the 12.2 releases of 12.2.0.1, 18 and 19, so a truly different version/release.

Also quite striking is the absence of all the changed libjava related functions, for which I don’t know if these function additions have anything to do with security. However, please mind I am not implying that this is not secure, I simply can’t tell.

Also, the functions that are removed and added do not seem to have any relationship with the added and removed functions in 12.2 and up. That might indicate that the PSU purely focussed on security updates to existing functions and issues that were logged against this version.

In the data dictionary there weren’t any changes spotted. Of course this overview focusses on availability of parameters and metadata (tables and their columns), for a look into the data dictionary you should look at the work of my colleague Rodrigo Jorge (dissecting the 201020 patches)

About the oracle database and compiling and linking.

This blogpost is about how the oracle database executable created or changed during installation and patching. I take linux for the examples, because that is the version that I am almost uniquely working with. I think the linux operating is where the vast majority of linux installations are installed on, and therefore an explanation with linux is helpful to most of the people.

The first thing to understand is the oracle executable is a dynamically linked executable. This is easy to see when you execute the ‘ldd’ utility against the oracle executable:

$ ldd oracle
	linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffd3f5b0000)
	libodm19.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libodm19.so (0x00007fa693084000)
	libofs.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libofs.so (0x00007fa692e82000)
	libcell19.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libcell19.so (0x00007fa692b69000)
	libskgxp19.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libskgxp19.so (0x00007fa69284d000)
	libskjcx19.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libskjcx19.so (0x00007fa692604000)
	librt.so.1 => /lib64/librt.so.1 (0x00007fa6923fb000)
	libclsra19.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libclsra19.so (0x00007fa6921c0000)
	libdbcfg19.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libdbcfg19.so (0x00007fa691f93000)
	libhasgen19.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libhasgen19.so (0x00007fa691270000)
	libskgxn2.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libskgxn2.so (0x00007fa69106d000)
	libocr19.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libocr19.so (0x00007fa690d49000)
	libocrb19.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libocrb19.so (0x00007fa690a49000)
	libocrutl19.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libocrutl19.so (0x00007fa690828000)
	libaio.so.1 => /lib64/libaio.so.1 (0x00007fa690625000)
	libons.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libons.so (0x00007fa6903d1000)
	libmql1.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libmql1.so (0x00007fa69016f000)
	libipc1.so => /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libipc1.so (0x00007fa68fcf5000)
	libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fa68faf1000)
	libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x00007fa68f76f000)
	libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007fa68f54f000)
	libnsl.so.1 => /lib64/libnsl.so.1 (0x00007fa68f336000)
	libresolv.so.2 => /lib64/libresolv.so.2 (0x00007fa68f11f000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007fa68ed5d000)
	/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fa693287000)

The way this works, is that a library is defined in the ELF (the executable format of linux executables) header of the oracle executable. This can be seen using the ‘readelf’ utility:

$ readelf -d oracle

Dynamic section at offset 0x16f03640 contains 45 entries:
  Tag        Type                         Name/Value
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libodm19.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libofs.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libcell19.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libskgxp19.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libskjcx19.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [librt.so.1]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libclsra19.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libdbcfg19.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libhasgen19.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libskgxn2.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libocr19.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libocrb19.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libocrutl19.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libaio.so.1]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libons.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libmql1.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libipc1.so]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libdl.so.2]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libm.so.6]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libpthread.so.0]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libnsl.so.1]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libresolv.so.2]
 0x0000000000000001 (NEEDED)             Shared library: [libc.so.6]
 0x000000000000000f (RPATH)              Library rpath: [/u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib]
 0x000000000000000c (INIT)               0xdb0d80
 0x000000000000000d (FINI)               0x12b54b90
 0x0000000000000019 (INIT_ARRAY)         0x17398c20
 0x000000000000001b (INIT_ARRAYSZ)       8 (bytes)
 0x000000006ffffef5 (GNU_HASH)           0x4002d0
 0x0000000000000005 (STRTAB)             0x9ddb10
 0x0000000000000006 (SYMTAB)             0x528128
 0x000000000000000a (STRSZ)              3567352 (bytes)
 0x000000000000000b (SYMENT)             24 (bytes)
 0x0000000000000015 (DEBUG)              0x0
 0x0000000000000003 (PLTGOT)             0x17504000
 0x0000000000000002 (PLTRELSZ)           26136 (bytes)
 0x0000000000000014 (PLTREL)             RELA
 0x0000000000000017 (JMPREL)             0xdaa768
 0x0000000000000007 (RELA)               0xda9328
 0x0000000000000008 (RELASZ)             5184 (bytes)
 0x0000000000000009 (RELAENT)            24 (bytes)
 0x000000006ffffffe (VERNEED)            0xda9188
 0x000000006fffffff (VERNEEDNUM)         7
 0x000000006ffffff0 (VERSYM)             0xd44a08
 0x0000000000000000 (NULL)               0x0

This shows the names of the needed shared libraries ‘(NEEDED)’. Some of the needed shared libraries are oracle shared libraries, such as libodm19.so, libofs.so, libcell19.so, libskgxp19.so and so on. Other libraries are operating system libraries, such as libc.so.6, libresolv.so.2, libnsl.so.1, libpthread.so.0, libm.so.6 and so on. The oracle libraries are found because an RPATH (runpath) is included in the header, in my case /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib. The operating system libraries are not included with the oracle installation, they are dynamically obtained from the operating system, for which the selection lies with the operating system.

So, we got the oracle executable, and we found out it’s a dynamically linked executable, which means that it’s using shared libraries for some of its functionality.

Now let’s take one step further. Whenever the oracle database software is installed or patched, it must be linked in order to build the executable with the current state of the software.
You might wonder the what I mean with the phrase ‘is installed’: you probably don’t execute a relink all. And that is sensible, because the installer does that for you, you can validate it in $ORACLE_HOME/install/make.log.
I’ll get to the manual linking in a bit.

The oracle database executable and compilation

The first thing to discuss now is compilation. Compilation is the process of turning text based code into a compiled form, for which a lot of compilers do not create an executable form, but an intermediary form, which is called an object. Turning an object or objects into an executable form is called linking. Compiling on linux is done using a compiler, and the default C compiler with Oracle and RedHat linux is gcc. Since Oracle 12.2, the compiler is not a requirement for installation anymore. It is documented, but I believe many may have missed this.

But isn’t there the $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib/config.c file, which is still there, and still used, and isn’t there the make target config.o (make -f ins_rdbms.mk config.o)? Yes, both of them are still there. And still gcc is not a requirement anymore. If you have a pressing need for changing the config.c file (which lists the dba,oper,asm,backup,dataguard,keymanagement and RAC group names), you can still change it, and when you remove the config.o file which USED to be generated with gcc, will now be generated by the ‘as’ executable (portable GNU assembler). This is visible in the oracle database executable make target (ioracle):

$ mv config.o config.O
$ make --dry-run -f ins_rdbms.mk ioracle
chmod 755 /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/bin
cd /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/; \
/usr/bin/as -o config.o `[ -f config.c ] && echo config.c || echo config.s`; \
/usr/bin/ar r /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libserver19.a /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/config.o
echo
echo " - Linking Oracle "
rm -f /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/oracle
/u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/bin/orald  -o /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/oracle -m64 -z noexecstack -Wl,--disable-new-dtags -L/u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/ -L/u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/ -L/u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/stubs/   -Wl,-E /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/opimai.o /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/ssoraed.o /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/ttcsoi.o -Wl,--whole-archive -lperfsrv19 -Wl,--no-whole-archive /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/nautab.o /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/naeet.o /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/naect.o /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/naedhs.o /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/config.o  -ldmext -lserver19 -lodm19 -lofs -lcell19 -lnnet19 -lskgxp19 -lsnls19 -lnls19  -lcore19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lcore19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lxml19 -lcore19 -lunls19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lcore19 -lnls19 -lclient19  -lvsnst19 -lcommon19 -lgeneric19 -lknlopt -loraolap19 -lskjcx19 -lslax19 -lpls19  -lrt -lplp19 -ldmext -lserver19 -lclient19  -lvsnst19 -lcommon19 -lgeneric19 `if [ -f /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libavserver19.a ] ; then echo "-lavserver19" ; else echo "-lavstub19"; fi` `if [ -f /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/libavclient19.a ] ; then echo "-lavclient19" ; fi` -lknlopt -lslax19 -lpls19  -lrt -lplp19 -ljavavm19 -lserver19  -lwwg  `cat /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/ldflags`    -lncrypt19 -lnsgr19 -lnzjs19 -ln19 -lnl19 -lngsmshd19 -lnro19 `cat /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/ldflags`    -lncrypt19 -lnsgr19 -lnzjs19 -ln19 -lnl19 -lngsmshd19 -lnnzst19 -lzt19 -lztkg19 -lmm -lsnls19 -lnls19  -lcore19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lcore19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lxml19 -lcore19 -lunls19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lcore19 -lnls19 -lztkg19 `cat /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/ldflags`    -lncrypt19 -lnsgr19 -lnzjs19 -ln19 -lnl19 -lngsmshd19 -lnro19 `cat /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/ldflags`    -lncrypt19 -lnsgr19 -lnzjs19 -ln19 -lnl19 -lngsmshd19 -lnnzst19 -lzt19 -lztkg19   -lsnls19 -lnls19  -lcore19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lcore19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lxml19 -lcore19 -lunls19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lcore19 -lnls19 `if /usr/bin/ar tv /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/libknlopt.a | grep "kxmnsd.o" > /dev/null 2>&1 ; then echo " " ; else echo "-lordsdo19 -lserver19"; fi` -L/u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/ctx/lib/ -lctxc19 -lctx19 -lzx19 -lgx19 -lctx19 -lzx19 -lgx19 -lclscest19 -loevm -lclsra19 -ldbcfg19 -lhasgen19 -lskgxn2 -lnnzst19 -lzt19 -lxml19 -lgeneric19 -locr19 -locrb19 -locrutl19 -lhasgen19 -lskgxn2 -lnnzst19 -lzt19 -lxml19 -lgeneric19  -lgeneric19 -lorazip -loraz -llzopro5 -lorabz2 -lorazstd -loralz4 -lipp_z -lipp_bz2 -lippdc -lipps -lippcore  -lippcp -lsnls19 -lnls19  -lcore19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lcore19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lxml19 -lcore19 -lunls19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lcore19 -lnls19 -lsnls19 -lunls19  -lsnls19 -lnls19  -lcore19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lcore19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lxml19 -lcore19 -lunls19 -lsnls19 -lnls19 -lcore19 -lnls19 -lasmclnt19 -lcommon19 -lcore19  -ledtn19 -laio -lons  -lmql1 -lipc1 -lfthread19    `cat /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/sysliblist` -Wl,-rpath,/u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib -lm    `cat /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib/sysliblist` -ldl -lm   -L/u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/lib `test -x /usr/bin/hugeedit -a -r /usr/lib64/libhugetlbfs.so && test -r /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/shugetlbfs.o && echo -Wl,-zcommon-page-size=2097152 -Wl,-zmax-page-size=2097152 -lhugetlbfs`
rm -f /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/bin/oracle
mv /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/rdbms/lib/oracle /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/bin/oracle
chmod 6751 /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/bin/oracle
(if [ ! -f /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/bin/crsd.bin ]; then \
    getcrshome="/u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/srvm/admin/getcrshome" ; \
    if [ -f "$getcrshome" ]; then \
        crshome="`$getcrshome`"; \
        if [ -n "$crshome" ]; then \
            if [ $crshome != /u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1 ]; then \
                oracle="/u01/app/oracle/product/19/dbhome_1/bin/oracle"; \
                $crshome/bin/setasmgidwrap oracle_binary_path=$oracle; \
            fi \
        fi \
    fi \
fi\
);
$ mv config.O config.o

First of all, I am in the $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib directory already. I moved the config.o file to a different name, config.O (uppercase O). This will trigger the config.o file to be generated during linking via the the makefile, because the make macro for generating the oracle executable checks for the existence of config.o in $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib, and the generation of config.o is triggered by it not existing.
I used make with the ‘–dry-run’ option, which means it will list what it WOULD do, it doesn’t actually do it.
Now that the make macro doesn’t find the $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib/config.o file, it generates it, using ‘as’, the GNU assembler.
After the run, I move the config.O file back to config.o.
Please mind the make target config.o (make -f ins_rdbms.mk config.o) still exists, and this follows the traditional way, so using gcc, to create the object file config.o.

For anything else than config.c, Oracle provides objects (the compiled, intermediary form of C) in object files. This has several advantages. First of all, the server to install oracle on doesn’t require a compiler. That also means that there is no discussion about compiler versions, Oracle knows for a fact which version of a compiler is used. Second, Oracle can use a different compiler than the GNU compiler, as long as it does provide objects in Linux X86_64 (ELF) format. In fact, that is what oracle does: for Oracle 19.9, Oracle used a compiler from intel: Intel(R) C Intel(R) 64 Compiler for applications running on Intel(R) 64, Version 17.0.2.174 Build 20170213
You can obtain that information from the oracle executable using:

$ readelf -p .comment oracle | egrep 'Intel.*Build\ [0-9]*'

I hope that at this point I made it clear that no compiler is needed anymore for oracle installation and making changes to the oracle installation, like patching.

The oracle database executable and objects and object files

It’s probably a good idea to show how the oracle executable is build. The way this happens is using the make target ‘ioracle’, which is visible above (make -f ins_rdbms.mk ioracle).
The macro calls ‘orald’, which actually is a script in $ORACLE_HOME/bin, which calls the operating-system ‘ld’ executable, which is the GNU linker.
The arguments to ‘orald’ are arguments that mostly are put through to ‘ld’. ‘-o’ is the output flag, and that shows the executable to be build by the linker, and besides options being set, what you mainly see is -L (library path) and -l (library) switches adding libraries (=object files and archive files) to build the oracle executable.
There’s a couple of places that are used to get objects to build the oracle executable:
– $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib — oracle database rdbms specific libraries
– $ORACLE_HOME/lib — oracle database general libraries (objects are used by multiple “products” in the $ORACLE_HOME)
– $ORACLE_HOME/lib/stubs — this is a directory with ‘stub objects’, which are versions of operating system libraries that contain no code, but allow the oracle executable to be build, even if a operating system library is missing (see: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/819-0690/chapter2-22.html)
– $ORACLE_HOME/ctx/lib — oracle text (not sure why oracle text requires an explicit lookup to $ORACLE_HOME/ctx/lib, while other options are all in $ORACLE_HOME/lib
– /lib64 — operating system libraries

At this point it’s important to realise that the object files for linking oracle are visible in two forms: as plain object files (.o) and as archive files (.a). Archive files are exactly what the name suggests: these are archives of object files. You can look and manipulate an archive file using the ‘ar’ (archiver utility), for which the working strongly resembles how tar and jar work: t=list, x=extract, c=create.
If you take a look at one of the main archives, libserver19.a, you see that it contains 2852 object files:

$ ar -t $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libserver19.a | wc -l
2852

If you do wonder what’s inside, ‘ar -tv’ would be a good way to have an idea:

$ ar -tv $ORACLE_HOME/lib/libserver19.a
rw-r--r-- 54321/54321  11136 Oct 19 21:12 2020 kdr.o
rw-rw-r-- 94110/42424   8376 Apr 17 04:58 2019 upd.o
rw-rw-r-- 94110/42424  41968 Apr 17 04:58 2019 kd.o
...
rw-r--r-- 54321/54321  13248 Oct 19 21:11 2020 qjsntrans.o
rw-r--r-- 54321/54321  20296 Oct 19 21:11 2020 kubsd.o
rw-r--r-- 54321/54321  16720 Oct 19 21:12 2020 kqro.o

The conclusion here is that archive files are logical and sensible, otherwise the library directories would have been swamped with huge numbers of object files.

When object files are linked to an executable, it requires object files, and these are in ‘.o’ files, or grouped in ‘.a’ files. A third type of file is needed for linking linking an executable that is going to be a dynamically linked executable: the libraries (the ‘.so’ files) the executable is dynamically going to use. The linker will validate the libraries, which means it inspects the libraries to find the symbols that the objects that form the executable is calling. A library (‘.so’ file) is an already compiled form, in facts it’s pretty much similar to an executable, only the way it’s invoked is when it’s called by a dynamically linked executable that uses it, instead of directly.

The object files itself

This above text pretty much describe how executables, libraries, object files and archives sit together, and how the linking creates the oracle executable via the makefile. This description describes how this is configured by oracle for creating the oracle executable. However, this is really flexible, and can be done differently, so this is not how it always is or should be, this is how oracle chosen it to do.

We can look one level deeper into how this works. An object file in fact is already an archive, containing one or more compiled versions of functions:

$ nm -A opimai.o
opimai.o:                 U dbkc_free_bs_context
opimai.o:                 U dbkc_init
opimai.o:                 U dbktFlush
opimai.o:                 U __intel_new_feature_proc_init
opimai.o:                 U kgeasnmierr
opimai.o:                 U kge_pop_guard_fr
opimai.o:                 U kge_push_guard_fr
opimai.o:                 U kge_report_17099
opimai.o:                 U kgeresl
opimai.o:                 U kge_reuse_guard_fr
opimai.o:                 U ksdwrf
opimai.o:                 U kseini
opimai.o:                 U ksmdsg
opimai.o:                 U ksmgpg_
opimai.o:                 U ksmlsge_phaseone
opimai.o:                 U ksmsgaattached_
opimai.o:                 U kso_save_arg
opimai.o:                 U kso_spawn_ts_save
opimai.o:                 U ksosp_parse
opimai.o:                 U ksuginpr
opimai.o:                 U lfvinit
opimai.o:0000000000000010 T main
opimai.o:                 U opiinit
opimai.o:0000000000000300 t opimai_init
opimai.o:0000000000000140 T opimai_real
opimai.o:                 U opiterm
opimai.o:                 U sdterm
opimai.o:                 U _setjmp
opimai.o:                 U skge_sign_fr
opimai.o:                 U skgmstack
opimai.o:                 U skgp_done_args
opimai.o:                 U skgp_retrieve_args
opimai.o:                 U slgtds
opimai.o:                 U slgts
opimai.o:                 U slkbpi
opimai.o:                 U slkfpi
opimai.o:                 U sou2o
opimai.o:                 U spargs
opimai.o:                 U ssthrdmain

This example takes the object file $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib/opimai.o, and this object file contains 3 actual functions (shown by an address and the symbol type ‘T’ or ‘t’), and a whole bunch of functions without an address and symbol type ‘U’. The functions with symbol type ‘U’ are undefined functions, which means that these functions are not in this archive, but defined somewhere else.
The important thing to consider is that a single symbol can contain multiple functions.

I chosen this object file, because this is in fact the actual object file where the main function, the starting function, for the oracle executable is in. If you obtain a stack trace of an oracle database process, the first function (called ‘first frame’) in at least recent linux versions (some other operating systems or versions might show earlier functions) will show main as the first function. This is also what the linker uses to build the executable, it follows the symbol information together with the command line switches to resolve and obtain all the functions via the symbol information. The linker will generate an error and not build the executable if it can’t find or resolve the symbols and get all the information it needs.

Patching

At this point you should have an understanding what a dynamically linked executable, libraries, object files and archives are, and that the oracle executable is build using a makefile using the linker.

It might be handy and interesting to look at patching. This information, the information about archives and objects, should give you more background about the specifics of patching. Oracle patching has many forms, and actually can do and change a lot of things in a lot of ways. It is retraceable what a patch does by looking at the contents of the patch. But that is now what this post is about.

Especially with one-off patches, in the case of a patch to fix or change one or more functions in the oracle executable, what the patch provides is the fixed and thus changed versions of these functions. However, oracle does not provide sourcecode. In general what oracle provides, is the object or objects containing the changed functions. In order to get the changed function or functions into the oracle executable, what generally happens is that the current/old versions of the object file are removed from the archive they are in, and saved in $ORACLE_HOME/.patch_storage, and the patched versions of the object file are inserted into the archive.

But, we saw an object file generally contains more or much more functions. Well, this is why patches can be incompatible with other patches: if multiple patches change different (or the same) functions in the same objects, the patch applied latest will undo the changes of the previous patch(es). This is also why you must request merge patches if patches are incompatible.

Dealing with individual object files, extracting them from an archive and saving them in order to be able to restore it into the archive is tedious. Also, the archive itself doesn’t mind whatever you remove from it or insert to it, even if it will break linking the oracle executable. Therefore, oracle has created opatch to perform a great deal of validations and checks, and take the work of dependency checks from you and fully automate it. In fact, in general, you can take a (one-off) patch and try to apply it, if it does, it will allow oracle to be relinked, if there is a conflicting patch it will tell you. Also, if you want to revert your applied patch, you can simply rollback and get opatch to load the previous version into the archive. This is way better than letting us humans deal with it directly.

After the patching changed the archives to contain the updated versions of the objects which contain updated functions, these must make it into the oracle executable. This must be done by relinking the executable, which will take the objects including the changed objects from all the object files and archives, and create a new executable. The oracle executable is never directly touched on linux with recent versions, to my knowledge.

I hope this explanation made sense and made a lot of these things which we are dealing with as oracle DBAs more understandable. Any comments or updates are welcome!

What’s new with Oracle database 12.2.0.1.200714 versus 12.2.0.1.201020

This blogpost takes a look at the technical differences between Oracle database 12.2.0.1 PSU 200714 (july 2020) and PSU 201020 (october 2020). This gives technical specialists an idea of the differences, and gives them the ability to assess if the PSU impacts anything.

Functions

code symbol names unique in version 12.2.0.1.200714 versus 12.2.0.1.201020

NAME                                                         RESOLVE                                                      ANNOTATION                                                                                 ARCHIVE_OBJECT
------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------
NAME                                               RESOLVE                                            ANNOTATION                                                                       ARCHIVE_OBJECT                                                 COUNT(*)
-------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ ----------
kcbo                                               kcbo                                               kernel cache buffers object queue                                                                                                                      1
kkdl                                               kkdl                                               kernel compile dictionary lookup                                                                                                                       1
kmgs                                               kmgs                                               kernel multi threaded/mman manage (sga) space (?)                                                                                                      1
kzpR                                               (kzp)R                                             kernel security privileges ??                                                                                                                          1
qcso                                               qcso                                               query compile semantic analysis (parser) OBJECTS                                                                                                       1
qeae                                               qeae                                               query execute aggregate (order by) elimination (?)                                                                                                     1
qkaI                                               (qka)I                                             query kernel allocation ??                                                                                                                             1
qkex                                               (qke)x                                             query kernel expressions ??                                                                                                                            1
qksh                                               (qks)h                                             query kernel sql ??                                                                                                                                    1
qksp                                               (qks)p                                             query kernel sql ??                                                                                                                                    1
krvx                                               krvx                                               kernel redo recovery extract                                                                                                                           2
kxtt                                               kxtt                                               kernel execution temporary table operations                                                                                                            2
Java                                               Java                                               java classes                                                                                                                                           6

code symbol names unique in version 12.2.0.1.201020 versus 12.2.0.1.200714

NAME                                               RESOLVE                                            ANNOTATION                                                                       ARCHIVE_OBJECT                                                 COUNT(*)
-------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ ----------
ECGr                                               (EC)Gr                                             elleptic curve cryptography ??                                                   libjavavm12.a:ecl.o                                                   7
Java                                               Java                                               java classes                                                                     libjavavm12.a:ShapeSpanIterator.o                                     7
ec_G                                               (ec_)G                                             elleptic curve cryptography ??                                                   libjavavm12.a:ecp_jac.o                                               7
mp_c                                               (mp_)c                                             multiple precision cryptography ??                                               libjavavm12.a:mpi.o                                                   7
mp_i                                               (mp_)i                                             multiple precision cryptography ??                                               libjavavm12.a:mpi.o                                                   7
mp_t                                               (mp_)t                                             multiple precision cryptography ??                                               libjavavm12.a:mpi.o                                                   7
mp_b                                               (mp_)b                                             multiple precision cryptography ??                                               libjavavm12.a:mp_gf2m.o                                               8
mp_s                                               (mp_)s                                             multiple precision cryptography ??                                               libjavavm12.a:mpi.o                                                  11
ec_G                                               (ec_)G                                             elleptic curve cryptography ??                                                   libjavavm12.a:ecl_gf.o                                               21
s_mp                                               s_mp                                               cryptography multiple precision                                                  libjavavm12.a:mpi.o                                                  49

This is a poor, yet one of the only ways to understand what is going on inside the oracle executable.
There aren’t that many thing removed, which is understandable, this is an update. 20 functions have been removed in total. The archive:object annotation is not there, I started doing that for the latest PSU.
For the functions that were added, the vast majority comes from libjavavm18, and seem to be cryptographic related functions.

It should be noted that if you compare the added functions and the changed functions with the Oracle 18 ones, a fair share of them are equal, but there are also functions unique to each version. Of course the equal functions probably are related to huge issues that must be fixed in all versions. The functions that are unique to this version are likely to be (minor-)version specific issues.

What’s new with Oracle database 18.11 versus 18.12

This blogpost takes a look at the technical differences between Oracle database 18 RU 11 (july 2020) and RU 12 (october 2020). This gives technical specialists an idea of the differences, and gives them the ability to assess if the RU impacts anything.

Functions

code symbol names unique in version 18.11 versus 18.12 -- so removed functions in RU 12.

NAME                                                         RESOLVE                                                      ANNOTATION                                                                                 ARCHIVE_OBJECT
------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------
Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_appendCubic           (Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_)appendCubic         java classes sun. java2d. pipe. ShapeSpanIterator. ??
Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_appendLine            (Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_)appendLine          java classes sun. java2d. pipe. ShapeSpanIterator. ??
Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_appendQuadratic       (Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_)appendQuadratic     java classes sun. java2d. pipe. ShapeSpanIterator. ??
Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_beginSubpath          (Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_)beginSubpath        java classes sun. java2d. pipe. ShapeSpanIterator. ??
Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_endPath               (Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_)endPath             java classes sun. java2d. pipe. ShapeSpanIterator. ??
Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_getCPathConsumer      (Java_sun_java2d_pipe_ShapeSpanIterator_)getCPathConsumer    java classes sun. java2d. pipe. ShapeSpanIterator. ??
kkdlpGetObjn                                                 (kkdl)pGetObjn                                               kernel compile dictionary lookup ??
kxttSCNGet                                                   (kxtt)SCNGet                                                 kernel execution temporary table operations ??
kxttSCNGetBoth                                               (kxtt)SCNGetBoth                                             kernel execution temporary table operations ??
kzpRoleEnabled                                               (kzp)RoleEnabled                                             kernel security privileges ??
qkspmTravInit                                                (qkspm)TravInit                                              query kernel sql plan management ??
skgpgprocstat                                                (skg)pgprocstat                                              operating system dependent kernel generic ??
skgpgthrstat                                                 (skg)pgthrstat                                               operating system dependent kernel generic ??

code symbol names unique in version 18.11 versus 18.12 (top 11) -- so added in the RU 12.

NAME                                               RESOLVE                                            ANNOTATION                                                                       ARCHIVE_OBJECT                                                 COUNT(*)
-------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ ----------
ECGr                                               (EC)Gr                                             elleptic curve cryptography ??                                                   libjavavm18.a:ecl.o                                                   7
Java                                               Java                                               java classes                                                                     libjavavm18.a:ShapeSpanIterator.o                                     7
ec_G                                               (ec_)G                                             elleptic curve cryptography ??                                                   libjavavm18.a:ecp_jac.o                                               7
mp_c                                               (mp_)c                                             multiple precision cryptography ??                                               libjavavm18.a:mpi.o                                                   7
mp_i                                               (mp_)i                                             multiple precision cryptography ??                                               libjavavm18.a:mpi.o                                                   7
mp_t                                               (mp_)t                                             multiple precision cryptography ??                                               libjavavm18.a:mpi.o                                                   7
mp_b                                               (mp_)b                                             multiple precision cryptography ??                                               libjavavm18.a:mp_gf2m.o                                               8
mp_s                                               (mp_)s                                             multiple precision cryptography ??                                               libjavavm18.a:mpi.o                                                  11
kewr                                               kewr                                               kernel event AWR repository                                                      libserver18.a:kewr.o                                                 14
ec_G                                               (ec_)G                                             elleptic curve cryptography ??                                                   libjavavm18.a:ecl_gf.o                                               21
s_mp                                               s_mp                                               cryptography multiple precision                                                  libjavavm18.a:mpi.o                                                  49

This is a poor, yet one of the only ways to understand what is going on inside the oracle executable.
There aren’t that many thing removed, which is understandable. Therefore I listed all the functions that were removed, not a as a grouped overview. The archive:object annotation is not there, I started doing that for the latest RU.
For the functions that were added, the vast majority comes from libjavavm18, and seem to be cryptographic related functions.

The only group that might show something is kewr (AWR), however I cannot see something in general that is changed, the names seem random:

NAME                                                         RESOLVE                                                      ANNOTATION                                                                                 ARCHIVE_OBJECT
------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------
kewramcs_app_map_condbid_str                                 (kewr)amcs_app_map_condbid_str                               kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewramvn_append_mdb_vvwname                                  (kewr)amvn_append_mdb_vvwname                                kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewraxc_attribute_xcb                                        (kewr)axc_attribute_xcb                                      kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrbtsg_build_topseg                                        (kewr)btsg_build_topseg                                      kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrccsq_collect_csql                                        (kewr)ccsq_collect_csql                                      kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrgcfes_get_cacheid_from_enum_str                          (kewr)gcfes_get_cacheid_from_enum_str                        kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrmplvl_map_snap_level                                     (kewr)mplvl_map_snap_level                                   kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrpfbue_pdb_from_buffer_entry                              (kewr)pfbue_pdb_from_buffer_entry                            kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrptsq_prep_topsql                                         (kewr)ptsq_prep_topsql                                       kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrrdsi_rank_dstat_item                                     (kewr)rdsi_rank_dstat_item                                   kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrrtsq_rank_topsql                                         (kewr)rtsq_rank_topsql                                       kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrsaobn_set_all_objnames                                   (kewr)saobn_set_all_objnames                                 kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrsonie_set_object_names_in_entry                          (kewr)sonie_set_object_names_in_entry                        kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o
kewrsqlc_sql_iscolored_cb                                    (kewr)sqlc_sql_iscolored_cb                                  kernel event AWR repository ??                                                             libserver18.a:kewr.o

Outside of code changes, there isn’t anything changed in the data dictionary.