Temporary tablespaces in RAC

Temporary tablespaces are shared objects and they are associated to an user or whole database (using default temporary tablespace). So, in RAC, temporary tablespaces are shared between the instances. Many temporary tablespaces can be created in a database, but all of those temporary tablespaces are shared between the instances. Hence, temporary tablespaces must be allocated in shared storage or ASM. We will explore the space allocation in temporary tablespace in RAC, in this blog entry.

In contrast, UNDO tablespaces are owned by an instance and all transactions from that instance is exclusively allocated in that UNDO tablespace. Remember that other instances can read blocks from remote undo tablespace, and so, undo tablespaces also must be allocated from shared storage or ASM.

Space allocation in TEMP tablespace

TEMP tablespaces are divided in to extents (In 11.2, extent size is 1M, not sure whether the size of an extent is controllable or not). These extent maps are cached in local SGA, essentially, soft reserving those extents for the use of sessions connecting to that instance. But, note that, extents in a temporary tablespace are not cached at instance startup, instead instance caches the extents as the need arises. We will explore this with a small example:

Troubleshooting ‘DFS lock handle’ waits

Waits for ‘DFS lock handle’ can cause massive performance issues in a busy RAC cluster. In this blog entry, we will explore the DFS lock handle wait event, and understand how to troubleshoot the root cause of these waits. I am also going to use locks and resources interchangeably in this blog, but internally, they are two different types of structures.

A little background

DFS (stands for Distributed File System) is an ancient name, associated with cluster file system operations, in a Lock manager supplied by vendors in Oracle Parallel Server Environment (prior name for RAC). But, this wait event has morphed and is now associated with waits irrelevant to database files also. Hence, it is imperative to understand the underlying details to debug the ‘DFS lock handle’ waits.

How does it work?

I have no access to the code, so read this paragraph with caution, as I may have misunderstood my test results: A process trying to acquire a lock on a global GES resource sends a AST(Asynchronous Trap) or BAST (Blocking Asynchronous Trap) message to LCK process, constructing the message with (lock pointer, resource pointer, and resource name) information. If the resource is not available, then the LCK process sends a message to the lock holder for a lock downgrade.