DBreplay why are you messing with my sequences ??

Well,
  I have been playing with dbreplay, and trying to re-run a production workload.  In order to capture a production workload, I don't have the luxury of bouncing the database.  I start the capture, and do a restore of production that is "roughly right".  A point in time recovery close to that point.

Well I've been fighting an issue for the last couple of days.  I run a replay, and I find a lot of the my sessions are getting hung up, and I have sequences that have starting values BEFORE the value they were set to at the beginning.  At first I thought the flashback somehow messed up my sequences, but now I know it is the replay.

Part of what the "prepare client" process does is this sql step

 SELECT MAX(FIRST_VALUE), MAX(LAST_VALUE), MIN(FIRST_VALUE), MIN(LAST_VALUE), SEQ_BOW, SEQ_NAME, INCREMENT_BY, CYCLE_FLAG, CACHE_SIZE 
  
 FROM WRR$_REPLAY_SEQ_DATA R, DBA_SEQUENCES S 
  
 WHERE R.SEQ_BOW = S.SEQUENCE_OWNER 
  
 AND R.SEQ_NAME = S.SEQUENCE_NAME 
  
 GROUP BY SEQ_NAME ,SEQ_BNM, SEQ_BOW, INCREMENT_BY, CYCLE_FLAG, CACHE_SIZE  

This step looks to see if the current value of the sequence is out of synch with the value when the capture was done.. If so it resynchs the sequences. Sweet eh ? but maybe not what you wanted.. This is what is actually being executed (when you run a trace).

 SELECT "OE"."CHANGE_TRACKING_SEQ".NEXTVAL FROM dual
  
 ALTER SEQUENCE "OE"."CHANGE_TRACKING_SEQ" MAXVALUE 1E27 MINVALUE -1E26 INCREMENT BY -789390 NOCACHE
  
 SELECT "OE"."CHANGE_TRACKING_SEQ".NEXTVAL FROM dual
  
 ALTER SEQUENCE "OE"."CHANGE_TRACKING_SEQ" INCREMENT BY 1 NOCACHE  

As you can see it takes the sequences, alters it to subract on the next call, executes the nextval, then resets with an alter. Pretty slick, but very hard to find.

Thank goodness for Logminer to help point me in the right direction as to who was altering my sequence.

Here is some additional advice. To check to see what sequences have been "reset" look at the last_ddl time from dba_objects. Capture the list of what's changed, and then flashback and get the originall ddl.

My process is now prepare clients, reset sequences, then release the clients.

Search words. database replay sequences out of order reset

Flashback and Sequences

I just ran into a situation using flashback and dbreplay. 

See my next post on DBReplay. this was the culprit.

Exadata presentations

Well, I'm finally getting my exadata presentations up on my blog.  I will give a synopsis of it so you can decide if you want to look through them.. I also included a some screenshots that are meaningless without some background.

Hardware  (download)

My conclusion on hardware is that the exadata is merely off the shelf hardware.  Yes putting together the hardware in the exadata configuration (with storage cells, and infiniband) does greatly improve performance over most "normal" configurations that use arrays (like Hitachi, IBM, EMC, etc. etc.) over Fiber.

You can build your own server/storage that is even faster using SSD over infininband and you can customize it to your needs balancing the storage and database for YOUR NEEDS.

Software (download)

This is where the solution shines.  As I said above you can build the hardware yourself, but the gain is in the software.. In my test case I took a 276gb table with 1.7billion rows, and scanned it in under a second by combining HCC, storage indexes and flashcache.  Pretty incredible (it only used 6gb of disk space too).

However, the more your application is OLTP like (so it is less likely to HCC compressed, and scanned) the less gain you see with this solution.

Enjoy !