Issue

Important alert for Oracle Database and GI RU 19.18.0 on Linux

Some of you may have seen the alert already released yesterday. And thanks to Peter Lehmann again for alerting me. When you logon to MyOracle Support, you will find it simply in the alert section to the left. On Jan 25, 2023, this Important alert for Oracle Database and GI RU 19.18.0 on Linux has been released.

Important alert for Oracle Database and GI RU 19.18.0 on Linux

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What is the situation?

Due to an issue described in MOS Note: 2923428.1 – LMON trace file with repeated entries of “Submitting asynchronized dump request” the Release Updates (RU) 19.18.0 for the Oracle Database and …

Upgrade from 11.2.0.4 to 19c with Label Security Policies

Posted on July 6, 2022 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls 5

I remember, I have a blog. Forgive me that I don’t write a lot at the moment even though I still have a long queue of “future posts to write”. It is just too busy, and I was away for almost two full weeks in June as well. But let me briefly drop information on an issue I learned about recently. It just affects your when Upgrade from 11.2.0.4 to 19c with Label Security Policies. All other readers may simply ignore this blog post.

Upgrade from 11.2.0.4 to 19c with Label Security Policies

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What happens?

You are using Oracle Label Security, and …

Simple database installation with applyRU and applyOneOffs

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Mike.Dietrich Installation Patch Recommendation 28

Some of you may remember my blog post from April 22, 2021 about issues I saw with the unattended installation using applyRU and applyOneOffs switches. The installation failed with a strange jox error when I passed on the OJVM bundle to my installation queue. But there is relief – finally, after almost one year. So let me give you some background, and of course show you the workaround for the Simple database installation with applyRU and applyOneOffs.

Simple database installation with applyRU and applyOneOffs

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What has happened?

A longer while ago, we introduced the very convenient ability to install patches …

Pitfall: Upgrade to 21c fails when ORDIM is present but no SDO

Posted on August 25, 2021 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Oracle Database 21c Upgrade / Migration 2

You may have read my previous blog post about Upgrading a non-CDB to Oracle Database 21c. And I referred to a potential Pitfall: Upgrade to 21c fails when ORDIM is present but no SDO. In this blog post I would like to explain how to avoid this pitfall beforehand and explain what needs to be done.

Pitfall: Upgrade to 21c fails when ORDIM is present but no SDO

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What’s the problem?

In my previous blog post I showed you the ideal and normal way. But during my tests I came across an issue I was not aware of – and I simply had no …

AutoUpgrade may run into a timeout when GI is lower than 19.10.0

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Mike.Dietrich ASM / RAC / GI Patch Recommendation 9

The other day I received a question from a colleague about the risk of having GI and database both not being on the same RU. And a long while ago I blogged about it. We recommend that you keep it in synch. But you don’t have to. At the same time I received a wish from Ernst Leber to post something on the blog he and his colleague had trouble with when upgrading to 19c in a RAC environment. AutoUpgrade hung. But he titled his email with “not an AutoUpgrade problem!”. Still I agree, it is worth to write …

You may need a one-off for DBMS_OPTIM_BUNDLE in 19.10.0

Posted on February 1, 2021 by Mike.Dietrich Optimizer Patch Recommendation 22

It’s been a while since I blogged about the DBMS_OPTIM_BUNDLE – and to me, the package is still sort of a mystery. Ideally you can least and enable or disable behavior changing optimizer fixes per RU. And in Oracle 19.10.0, you will find a new surprise. So You may need a one-off for DBMS_OPTIM_BUNDLE in 19.10.0.

You may need a one-off for DBMS_OPTIM_BUNDLE in 19.10.0

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Quick Recap

Just in case you haven’t dealt with DBMS_OPTIM_BUNDLE yet or for a while, a quick recap.

With this procedure, you can list the available patches to turn on or off at will:

SQL> set serveroutput

Apply Patch 31088341 before Upgrade to prevent ORA-1403

Posted on November 23, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls 6

As I learned from a customer this week, this patch is a must have when you use Partitioning and you attempt to upgrade to Oracle 19.9.0 or earlier. So please apply patch 31088341 before Upgrade to prevent ORA-1403 happening.

Apply Patch 31088341 before Upgrade to prevent ORA-1403

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What is the issue?

This applies to all 19c upgrades at least until 19.9.0.

The fix is included from 19.10.0 Release Update onward. So if you are upgrading to 19.10.0 or higher, you can stop reading here (thanks Pablo for the hint!).

You may see this error pattern in catupgrd0.log:

==Error from catupgrd0.log===

=================================================================

OJVM datapatch fails with ORA-29532 – but the root cause is noncdb_to_pdb.sql

Posted on April 20, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls JVM 2

Kudos to Robert Ortel who brought this nice misbehavior to my attention. And even though it looks like this would be an OJVM issue, it is caused by noncdb_to_pdb,sql, the script which is used to convert a non-CDB to a PDB. When you apply an OJVM patch, OJVM datapatch fails with ORA-29532 – but the root cause is noncdb_to_pdb.sql.

OJVM datapatch fails with ORA-29532 - but the root cause is noncdb_to_pdb.sql

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It’s a bit tricky

First things first. This is not a blog post to blame OJVM. The problem just happens because datapatch for an OJVM patch touches data in the dictionary which hasn’t …

OPatch Alert: Be aware of cleanup issues – and the JDK version

Posted on April 17, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Patch Recommendation 8

This is just a quick alert blog post for Friday with an OPatch Alert: Be aware of cleanup issues – and the JDK version. And thanks to several people who either commented or mailed me directly and asked if I could alert others as well.

Photo by Hugo Jehanne on Unsplash

OPatch cleanup issue

At first, you may have read earlier this week my article about patching my environments with the April 2020 bundle patches. For my patch activity, I’ve had to exchange my OPatch versions for 11.2.0.4, 12.2.0.1 and 19.7.0. And I guess, I would have had …

APEX is invalid after upgrading to 12.2 – ORA-20001

Posted on February 11, 2020 by Mike.Dietrich APEX Flaws and Pitfalls 0

We are running the AutoUpgrade-for-RAC beta test since last week. And the first issue one customer encountered … is neither an AutoUpgrade nor a RAC issue. It has to do with APEX and SPATIAL, and missing grants. APEX is invalid after upgrading to 12.2 – ORA-20001

APEX is invalid after upgrading to 12.2 - ORA-20001

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What is happening?

You are doing an upgrade to Oracle Database 12.2.0.1. And you receive a number of errors during the component validation phase.

19:04:14 SQL> EXECUTE dbms_registry_sys.validate_components;
...(19:04:15) Starting validate_apex for APEX_180100
ORA-20001: MISSING GRANT: grant execute on "MDSYS"."SDO_DIM_ARRAY" to APEX_180100
ORA-20001: MISSING GRANT: grant execute on

The newest patching surprises – and how to fix some of them

Posted on September 4, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Patch Recommendation 19

Well, there is no Product Manager for patching. And I’m glad that I’m not in this position. But thanks to all of you, internally and externally, who share your findings with me. In this blog post I’d like to inform you about the newest patching surprises – and how to fix some of them.

The newest patching surprises - and how to fix some of them

Patch apply without confirmation?

Peter Lehmann informed me about this a few weeks ago. Peter told me that he patched systems with the July 2019 RU for Oracle 12.2.0.1 and recognized that the patch installed with opatch without waiting for confirmation. It looked as somebody has …

Transportable Tablespace PDB Migration and Local Undo

Posted on May 17, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Single-/Multitenant 2

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

Sometimes it is necessary to warn you about known pitfalls to avoid frustration. In this particular case I decided not to blog about it simply because I thought this won’t happen to too many other people. Well, yesterday my good friend Philippe Fierens dropped me a message about an issue he ran into with a Transportable Tablespace PDB Migration and Local Undo. And I immediately knew what caused him trouble – and I regret that I didn’t blog about it (sorry Philippe!). We’ve seen the same problem with a large ExaCC migration project …

Why you should set _EXCLUDE_SEED_CDB_VIEW=FALSE

Posted on April 15, 2019 by Mike.Dietrich Single-/Multitenant 3

Why you should set _EXCLUDE_SEED_CDB_VIEW=FALSE

There usually a philosophic battle happening when it comes to underscore parameters. The official statement is more or less: It’s an underscore, hence it is undocumented and you shouldn’t touch it unless Oracle Support advises you to do so. I agree in many cases. But in this specific one, I don’t. And in this post I will explain why you should set _EXCLUDE_SEED_CDB_VIEW=FALSE in all your singe- and Multitenant environments. Always!

A bit of history

At first, a little bit of a history excursion. This parameter wasn’t an underscore in Oracle 12.1. You can find it as EXCLUDE_SEED_CDB_VIEW in 12.1.0.1 …

RMAN Backup Gives RMAN-06091: No Channel Allocated for Maintenance

Posted on August 21, 2018 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls RMAN 17

RMAN Backup Gives RMAN-06091: No Channel Allocated for Maintenance I really don’t want to turn this blog into an accumulation of issues and flaws. But as I explained many times before, the blog for me is also a way to dump information I likely will need the sooner or later again.

Recently I blogged about another RMAN issue in Oracle 12.2.0.1 with traces. This was fixed with the July 2018 RU for Oracle 12.2.0.1. But the issue below about which Piero Ferraz from Brazil alerted me (thanks!!!), happens in exactly this RU.

RMAN Backup Gives RMAN-06091: No Channel Allocated for Maintenance

This issue gets introduced with the July …

Special characters show junk in CLOB columns after upgrade to Oracle 12.2.0.1 with JDBC

Posted on July 13, 2018 by Mike.Dietrich Patch Recommendation 8

Thanks to my support colleague Roland Graeff who told me about this issue at a customer today. And I consider this a pretty serious issue. It can happen that Special characters show junk in CLOB columns after upgrade to Oracle 12.2.0.1. with JDBC.

This is as bad as it sounds. Roland told me about a case where the application showed weird characters instead of German umlauts (ä, ö, ü, Ä, Ö, Ü) after an upgrade from Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 to 12.2.0.1.

Special characters show junk in CLOB columns after upgrade to Oracle 12.2.0.1 with JDBC

Roland explained to me that …

RMAN backup generates traces in Oracle 12.2.0.1

Posted on May 24, 2018 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls 5

RMAN backup generates traces in Oracle 12.2.0.1 Oracle 12.2.0.1 seems to be the “tracing” release without further patch or parameter treatments. After posting about MMON unconditional traces in Oracle 12.2.0.1 a day ago, I received a couple of comments either on the blog, via LinkedIn or Twitter regarding other trace facilities in Oracle Database 12.2.0.1. One of them is the case that RMAN backup generates traces in Oracle 12.2.0.1.

And please, very important upfront:
Oracle Database 12.2.0.1 is a very stable and reliable release based on all the customer feedback Roy and I received so far. For instance, when we check for optimizer issues …

MMON unconditional traces in Oracle 12.2.0.1

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls 10

MMON unconditional traces in Oracle 12.2.0.1 I love visiting customers onsite. Last week I visited die Mobiliar in Bern, Switzerland. I received a list of open issues to discuss – which is very good to prepare a visit. And when we all were sitting together there was this “Ah, one final thing”. They have an issue with traces the databases writes every few seconds. As a remedy the DBAs increased the backup interval to remove the traces as otherwise the system would potentially run out of inodes or space. All the traces had the same pattern. And I learned quickly: these are MMON unconditional traces in …

Issue with PDB Archives in Oracle 12.2.0.1 in ASM

Posted on May 22, 2017 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Single-/Multitenant 7

There is a fancy new command to unplug a PDB in Oracle Database 12.2.0.1:

ALTER PLUGGABLE DATABASE pdb1 UNPLUG INTO 'pdb1.pdb';

The nice thing with this command differing in the file ending of ‘pdb‘ instead of ‘xml‘ as you used it in Oracle 12.1 (and the ‘xml‘ option is still available of course): Instead of just creating an xml description file it zips everything together into a PDB archive.

SQL> show pdbs

    CON_ID CON_NAME			  OPEN MODE  RESTRICTED
---------- ------------------------------ ---------- ----------
	 2 PDB$SEED			  READ ONLY  NO
SQL> create pluggable

DBA_REGISTRY_HISTORY vs DBA_REGISTRY_SQLPATCH

Posted on November 30, 2016 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Patch Recommendation 9

At the DOAG Conference in November in Nürnberg in November 2016 a customer asked me right after my talk about “Upgrade to Oracle Database 12.2. – Live and Uncensored” why the DBA_REGISTRY_HISTORY does not get updated when he applies a Bundle Patch and follows all instructions including the “./datapatch -verbose” call.

I was wondering as well and asked him to open an SR. Which he did. And he received the message from Support that it is not supposed to appear in Oracle 12c anymore this way but only in DBA_REGISTRY_SQLPATCH. Now I dug a bit deeper …

_rowsets_enabled – Apply patch and use the default

Posted on October 11, 2016 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Optimizer Oracle Database 12c Parameters Patch Recommendation 1

I while back I blogged about issues with “rowsets“, a new Oracle 12c feature which unfortunately had two known wrong result (WQR) bugs:

Switch off “_rowsets_enabled” in Oracle Database 12c

UPDATE: _rowsets_enabled in Oracle Database 12c

What does “rowsets” actually mean?

I’d like to thank Sankar, our Development manager for providing this explanation which sheds some light on how important this feature actually is:

“Rowsets is a SQL execution performance enhancement introduced in Oracle RDBMS release 12.1 and further extended in a future release of the Oracle Database.

Prior to 12.1, data processing in the SQL layer were

GC Freelist Session Waits causing slowness and hangs

Posted on March 22, 2016 by Mike.Dietrich Behavior Change Flaws and Pitfalls Oracle Database 12c Parameters Patch Recommendation 0

One of the best things in my job:
I learn from you folks out there. Everyday.

Credits here go to Maciej Tokar who did explain the below topic to me via LinkedIn – thanks a lot, Maciej!

Locks are not being closed fast enough, resulting in gc freelist waits

You can find a reference for Global Cache Freelist in the Oracle Documentation. This issue here can or will lead to database being slow, up to complete hangs. Based on my research it looks as the issue is not related to RAC only but a general thing. In your session …

Switch off “_rowsets_enabled” in Oracle Database 12c

Posted on November 10, 2015 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Optimizer Oracle Database 12c Parameters 1

Please find a recent update here:

UPDATE: _rowsets_enabled in Oracle Database 12c

and more important:

_rowsets_enabled – Apply patch and use the default

Twitter is a good thing. I get alerted on things I haven’t seen before. And sometimes some things are more than interesting.

This one is actually proven by Jonathan Lewis – and you can read all the details in Jonathan’s blog post here:

https://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/wrong-results/

There seems to be a realistic chance to get wrong query results displayed (regardless of using SQL*Plus or a JDBC or any other client – see the comment by Stefan Koehler below …

Ouch, this hurts: bug 20880215 – patch Oracle 12c

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Oracle Database 12c Patch Recommendation 3

Patch

Just realized that my preivous blog post heading was misleading: it said “patch AFTER upgrade” which is misleading. You should apply this patch BEFORE you upgrade but of course to your new/future Oracle 12c home. If you hit the issue then apply the patch after upgrading to remedy it. Sorry for the confusion.

No updates for over a week? Sorry for that but too many workshops, swamped with OOW prep work – and a wonderful issue with the browser cache and the blog software putting all my new blog post work directly into /dev/null.

Thanks to Marcel Paul for …

DBCA 12c and “datapatch.pl” – things to know

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Mike.Dietrich DBCA Flaws and Pitfalls Oracle Database 12c Patch Recommendation 26

A few weeks ago I did blog about the DBUA (Database Upgrade Assistant) not executing ‘datapatch’ (i.e. not applying the SQL changes involved with a SPU/PSU/BP) automatically:

DBUA 12c and “datapatch.pl” – things to know

For DBUA, please note that this behavior DOES NOT APPLY to command line upgrades done with catctl.pl – as you can see from this somewhat disturbing messages during the upgrade in phase 65 and phase 69 (which are not errors but just informational messages for datapatch’s execution):

Datapatch phases command line upgrade catctl.pl

But afterwards I have learned that things are worse.
The same behavior is true when you create

Optimizer Issue in Oracle 12.0.1.2: “Reduce Group By”

Posted on July 28, 2015 by Mike.Dietrich Flaws and Pitfalls Optimizer Oracle Database 12c Parameters 4

DBAs biggest fears I’d guess are Optimizer Wrong Query Results bugs as usually the optimizer does not write a message into the alert.log saying “Sorry, I was in a bad mood today …”.

The Oracle Database Optimizer is a complex piece – and in Oracle 12c it delivers great performance results. Plus (my personal experience when you know what to do) it is more predictable which I like a lot when changing databases from one to another release. But due to its complexity sometimes we see issues – and sometimes it is necessary to switch off tiny little pieces …

Issue

What is the situation?

What happens?

What has happened?

What’s the problem?

Quick Recap

What is the issue?

It’s a bit tricky

OPatch cleanup issue

What is happening?

Patch apply without confirmation?

A bit of history

RMAN Backup Gives RMAN-06091: No Channel Allocated for Maintenance

Special characters show junk in CLOB columns after upgrade to Oracle 12.2.0.1 with JDBC

What does “rowsets” actually mean?

Locks are not being closed fast enough, resulting in gc freelist waits

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