Manuals

From time to time I read a question (or, worse, an answer) on OTN and wonder how someone could have managed to misunderstand some fundamental feature of Oracle – and then, as I keep telling people everyone should do – I re-read the manuals and realise that sometimes the manuals make it really easy to come to the wrong conclusion.

Having nothing exciting to do on the plane to Bucharest today, I decided it was time to read the Concepts manual again – 12c version – to remind myself of how much I’ve forgotten. Since I was reading the mobi version on an iPad mini I can’t quote page numbers, but at “location 9913 of 16157” I found the following text in a sidebar:

“LGWR can write redo log entries to disk before a transaction commits. The redo entries become permanent only if the transaction later commits.”

Now I know what that’s trying to say because I already know how Oracle works – but it explains the various questions that I’ve seen on OTN (and elsewhere) struggling with the idea of how Oracle manages to “not have” redo for transactions that didn’t commit.

The redo entries become permanent the moment they are written to disc – nothing makes any of the content of the redo log files disappear ¹, nothing goes back and flags some bits of the redo log as “not really there”. It’s the changes to the data blocks that have been described by the redo that become permanent only if the transaction later commits. If the transaction rolls back² the session doesn’t “seek and destroy” the previous redo, it generates MORE redo (based on the descriptions that it originally put into the undo segment) and applies the changes described by that redo to reverse out the effects of the previous changes.

So next time you see a really bizarre question about how Oracle works remember that it could have arisen from someone reading the manual carefully; because sometimes the manual writers know exactly what they mean to say but don’t manage to say it clearly and unambiguously.

¹ I am aware that strange and rare events such as disc crashes could make all sorts of things disappear but I think it’s reasonable to assume here that we’re talking about standard processing mechanisms.

² I am also aware that there are variations dependent on events like sessions being killed or instance failure that could need some further explanation, but there’s a time, place, and pace, for everything.