Guenadi N Jilevski's Oracle BLOG

Oracle RAC 11g cache coherency

Oracle RAC 11g cache coherency

Let’s briefly review the concepts of RAC prior discussing the tuning issues. Each instance has a buffer cache in its System Global Area (SGA). Using Cache Fusion, Oracle RAC environments logically combine each instance’s buffer cache to enable the instances to process data as if the data resided on a logically combined, single cache. The SGA size requirements for Oracle RAC are greater than the SGA requirements for single-instance Oracle databases due to Cache Fusion. To ensure that each Oracle RAC database instance obtains the block that it requires to satisfy a query or transaction, Oracle RAC instances use two processes, the Global Cache Service (GCS) and the Global Enqueue Service (GES). The GCS and GES maintain records of the statuses of each data file and each cached block using a Global Resource Directory (GRD). The GRD contents are distributed across all of the active instances, which effectively increases the size of the SGA for an Oracle RAC instance. After one instance caches data, any other instance within the same cluster database can acquire a block image from another instance in the same database faster than by reading the block from disk. Therefore, Cache Fusion moves current blocks between instances rather than re-reading the blocks from disk. When a consistent block is needed or a changed block is required on another instance, Cache Fusion transfers the block image directly between the affected instances. Oracle RAC uses the private interconnect for interinstance communication and block transfers. The GES Monitor and the Instance Enqueue Process manages access to Cache Fusion resources and enqueue recovery processing. The GCS and GES processes, and the GRD collaborate to enable Cache Fusion.

December 13, 2009 - Posted by gjilevski | oracle