Taking a career change

Well, I have decided to make a change and take a job with oracle.  I am very excited about this move, and I look forward to being more involved in big data.  As any of you know (who have read my blog posts), I have taken a strong interest in this area.  I know I'm not the only one.  You probably have heard the terms  "Data Scientist"...   Hadoop...  R..  These are all the areas that I'm going to be delving into in my new position.
  I will continue to blog, probably mostly about the same topics I blog about now.  I am looking forward to this change, and becoming part of this evolution.  Many people are saying that Big Data is the next big change (like the internet),  whether this is true or not, we shall see. 

Problem debugging for DBFS

In trying to find out the cause of a DBFS issue, I learned what is expected (or helpful) when working with Support on DBFS issues.

1)  Logon trigger for dbfs user to create a trace file..

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER DBFS_LOGON
AFTER LOGON
ON DATABASE
declare
username VARCHAR2(30);
BEGIN
  username:=SYS_CONTEXT('USERENV','SESSION_USER');
  IF username like 'FOO' then
    dbms_dbfs_content.setTrace(3);
    execute immediate 'alter session set events ''45050 trace name context forever, level 0xfffff'' ';
  END IF;
EXCEPTION
   WHEN OTHERS THEN
      NULL;
END;
/ 

2) Start the DBFS client with tracing turned on.  (-otrace_file=,trace_level=2,trace_size=0). (see How to trace DBFS when any failure happens [ID 1320683.1])

Remember if you are running DBFS, you are probably on a multi-node clustered environment, so you only need to do these steps on one of the nodes to gather the data.  I turned the logon trigger on, remounted the FS with tracing..  reproduced issue. Verified the log files were created, disabled trigger, remounted without tracing..  I did this on only one node, and gathered what I needed with minimal issues.

Where is my space on DBFS

I just ran into an issue on DBFS where I ran out of space.

First here is the df -k

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
dbfs-dbfs_admin2@:/   20983808  11443696   9540112  55% /dbfs/dba

OK, everything looks good.. I am using 11g and I have 9.5g available.

I go to copy a file on the os (you can see it is 240m).  Lots of room

 ls -al bsg.out
-rw-r--r-- 1 oracle oinstall 240794862 May 18 11:37 bsg.out

cp bsg.out bsg.out1
cp: writing `bsg.out1': No space left on device
cp: closing `bsg.out1': No space left on device

So where is my space.  ?? I find this query..

set serveroutput on;
declare
v_segment_size_blocks number;
v_segment_size_bytes number;
v_ number;
v_used_blocks number;
v_used_bytes number;
v_expired_blocks number;
v_expired_bytes number;
v_unexpired_blocks number;
v_unexpired_bytes number;
begin
dbms_space.space_usage ('DBFS_OWNER', 'LOB_SFS$_FST_12345', 'LOB', 
v_segment_size_blocks, v_segment_size_bytes,
v_used_blocks, v_used_bytes, v_expired_blocks, v_expired_bytes, 
v_unexpired_blocks, v_unexpired_bytes );
dbms_output.put_line('Segment Size blocks = '||v_segment_size_blocks);
dbms_output.put_line('Segment Size bytes = '||v_segment_size_bytes);
dbms_output.put_line('Used blocks = '||v_used_blocks);
dbms_output.put_line('Used bytes = '||v_used_bytes);
dbms_output.put_line('Expired Blocks = '||v_expired_blocks);
dbms_output.put_line('Expired Bytes = '||v_expired_bytes);
dbms_output.put_line('UNExpired Blocks = '||v_unexpired_blocks);
dbms_output.put_line('UNExpired Bytes = '||v_unexpired_bytes);
end;
/

And I see this output

Segment Size blocks = 2619024
Segment Size bytes = 21455044608
Used blocks = 1425916
Used bytes = 11681103872
Expired Blocks = 1190111
Expired Bytes = 9749389312
UNExpired Blocks = 0
UNExpired Bytes = 0

So.. according to this.. The segment is 21.4 g

11.7g is used space
  9.7g is Expired space
   0g   is unexpired space.

So if I have 9.7g of Expired space why can't I use it ??  My file is only 244m, and I should have 9.7 g available.

So my questions out of this are (if anyone knows the answer).

1) How does this happen and how do I avoid it ?

2) How do I size tablespaces for DBFS ?  They need more space to be available then I need for the file system.

3) How do I monitor the sizing since the DF -k does not report unexpired bytes that are available to be used ?

4) How does the clause "retention" fit into this ?  retention defaults to "auto" rather than "none".  Can I set it to "none", but what happens and does this solve my problem ?


Oh, and I wanted to make sure that I included the ouput of  whats in the tablespace.

SEGMENT_NAME                                             SEGMENT_TYPE       SEGMENT_SIZE
-------------------------------------------------------- ------------------ ------------
LOB_SFS$_FST_12345                                       LOBSEGMENT                20461
T_ADMIN                                                  TABLE                        17
IP_SFS$_FST_12345                                        INDEX                         4
IPG_SFS$_FST_12345                                       INDEX                         3
IG_SFS$_FST_12345                                        INDEX                         2
SYS_IL0000095835C00007$$                                 LOBINDEX                      0

UPDATE (6/13/12)  --

After working with support on this, it was filed as a bug.  This occured because I was using DBFS as a filesytem for my dbreplay capture.  After thinking about it the dbcapture is probably the most intensive workload I could throw at DBFS.  Not only does it simultaneously write to multiple files, but it writes to those files across multiple nodes.  In my capture there were 4 nodes writing to 100's of files at the same time.
   I will be testing the patch, and see if it corrects the problem.  Support is telling me that the writing across multiple nodes is causing some of the issues..