Clustering_factor

I had a recent conversation at Oracle OpenWorld 2015 about a locking anomaly in a 3-node RAC system which was causing unexpected deadlocks. Coincidentally, this conversation came about shortly after I had been listening to Martin Widlake talking about using the procedure dbms_stats.set_table_prefs() to adjust the way that Oracle calculates the clustering_factor for indexes. The juxtaposition of these two topics made me realise that the advice I had given in “Cost Based Oracle – Fundamentals” 10 years ago was (probably) incomplete, and needed some verification. The sticking point was RAC.

In my original comments about setting the table_cached_blocks preference (as it is now known) I had pointed out that the effect of ASSM (with its bitmap space management blocks) was to introduce a small amount of random scattering as rows were inserted by concurrent sessions and this would adversely affect the clustering_factor of any indexes on the table, so a reasonable default value for the table_cached_blocks preference would be 16.

I had overlooked the fact that in RAC each instance tries to acquire ownership of its own level 1 (L1) bitmap block in an attempt to minimise the amount of global cache contention.  If each instance uses a different L1 bitmap block to allocate data blocks then (for tables and their partitions) they won’t be using the same data blocks for inserts and they won’t even have to pass the bitmap blocks between instances when searching for free space. The consequence of this, though, is that if N separate instances are inserting data into a single table there are typically 16 * N different blocks into which sessions could be inserting concurrently so the “most recent” data could be scattered across 16N blocks, which means the appropriate value table_cached_blocks is 16N.

To demonstrate the effect of RAC and multiple L1 blocks here’s a little demonstration code from a 12c RAC database with 3 active instances.

create tablespace test_8k_assm_auto
datafile size 67108864
logging online permanent
blocksize 8192
extent management local autoallocate default
nocompress segment space management auto
;

create table t1 (n1 number, c1 char(1000)) storage (initial 8M next 8M);

The code above simply creates a tablespace using locally managed extents with system allocated extent sizes then creates a table in that tablespace with a starting requirement of 8MB. Without this specification of initial the first few extents for the table would have been 64KB thanks to the system allocation algorithm and that would have spoiled the demonstration because the table would have started by allocating a single extent of 64KB with just one L1 bitmap block. Slightly different effects would also have appeared with an extent size of 1MB – with 2 L1 bitmap blocks – which is the second possible extent size for system allocation.

Having created the table I connected one session to each of the three instances and inserted one row, with commit, from each instance. Then I ran a simple SQL statement to show me the file and block numbers of the rows inserted:

select
        dbms_rowid.rowid_relative_fno(rowid)    file_no,
        dbms_rowid.rowid_block_number(rowid)    block_no,
        count(*)                                rows_in_block
from
        t1
group by
        dbms_rowid.rowid_relative_fno(rowid),
        dbms_rowid.rowid_block_number(rowid)
order by
        dbms_rowid.rowid_relative_fno(rowid),
        dbms_rowid.rowid_block_number(rowid)
;


   FILE_NO   BLOCK_NO ROWS_IN_BLOCK
---------- ---------- -------------
        19        518             1
        19        745             1
        19       2157             1

As you can see, each row has gone into a separate block – more significantly, though, those blocks are a long way apart from each other – they are in completely different sets of 16 block – each instance is working with its own L1 block (there are 16 of them to choose from in an 8MB extent) and has formatted 16 blocks associated with that L1 for its own use.

In fact this simple test highlighted an anomaly that I need to investigate further. In my first test, after inserting just 3 rows into the table I found that Oracle had formatted 288 blocks (18 groups of 16) across 2 extent – far more than seems reasonable. The effect looks hugely wasteful but that’s mainly because I’ve implied that I have a “large” table into which I’ve then inserted very little data – nevertheless something a little odd has happened. In my second test it got worse because Oracle formatted 16 blocks on the first insert,  took that up to 288 blocks on the second insert, then went up to 816 blocks (using a third extent) on the third insert; then in my third test Oracle behaved as I had assumed it ought to, formatting 3 chunks of 16 blocks each in a single extent – but that might have been because I did a truncate rather than a drop and recreate.

Summary

Whatever else is going on, the key point of this note is that if you’re trying to get Oracle to give you a better estimate for the clustering_factor in a RAC system then “16 * instance-count” is probably a good starting point for setting the table preference known as table_cached_blocks.

The anomaly of data being scattered extremely widely with more extents being allocated than you might expect is probably a boundary condition that you don’t have to worry about – but I may change my mind about that when I’ve had time to look at it a little more closely.