In this post:

• General – the presentation file
• Australia and Europe Webinar is scheduled (July 27^th 2011)
• SCAN Questions and Answers

General

This is a follow up post to answer questions you asked during my “Oracle 11G SCAN: RAC SIG webcast” at June 16th.

You can get the full presentation HERE – “Oracle 11G SCAN: Concepts and implementation experience sharing”. If you are not a member please feel free to join the RAC SIG. The membership is free and it will take you just couple of minutes to get registered (hint: check your spam folder if you don’t see password email from RAC SIG).

Australia and Europe Webinar is scheduled (July 27th 2011)

If you missed the “Oracle11G SCAN: Sharing successful implementation experience” Webinar then you have a chance to see it. For Australia – Europe time zones I am repeating it at July 27th.
If you are interested please feel free to register:
Australia – I would love you to go through Sydney Oracle Meetup site
For All others – please register HERE

Questions & Answers

Thanks for all your questions guys you asked during the presentation! Some of them deserve a whole presentation to make the answer complete. Let see if I will find enough motivation and time to follow up with a SCAN2 presentations. Meanwhile let me give you some short answers and possible hints. Below are ALL questions I recorded during the Webinar. I tried my best to provide the best answers I can give in limited time frame I had. If you have any further questions or related comment please be my guest and post a comment under this post.

Question from Rick Blythe:

Q: What happens during failure events ? – How scan connection still works when node dies? When local listener dies/when scan listener dies… ?
A: The main component that makes the solution agnostic to nodes’ failures are 3 SCAN listeners and related IP addresses. Those listeners are Cluster wide services meaning that any of 3 listeners are not bind to any particular node and can run on any of the nodes. If one of the nodes crashes than the following happens:
–    Survived nodes will have at least 1 SCAN listener running
–    Short time (a minute) after the crash SCAN Listener records got refreshed and new client request are not forwarded to the crashed node anymore
–    Failed SCAN listeners got started on survived nodes
–    After a minute (default refresh time) new SCAN listener’s instances know about the DB instances that serves certain services configured and start function as before.
I think during the crash itself there are a small timeframe when client connections may get some errors alike the following. However in 1-2 minutes it all gets to normal:

"ORA-12514: TNS:listener does not currently know of service requested in connect descriptor"

The exact SCAN information refresh process is to be investigated. I am guessing Oracle Process and Notification service might be part of the process as each of the listeners keeps connection to “127.0.0.1:6100” socket.

Question from Anand Sathyamurthy:

Q: Yury great presentation, great thoughts. How to connections in ebsusinessuite in tns_admin

A: Thank you Anand for the great question. Since certain ATG autoconfig templates version Oracle officially supports SCAN. Please see the following note:
Using Oracle 11g Release 2 Real Application Clusters with Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 [ID 823587.1]

Questions from Pascal:

Hello Yury, thank you for a Great Presentation!

Q1: I have a Question regarding SCAN and Static Listeners. How to configure or integrate Static Listeners in a RAC Environment which is using SCAN? This is required for instance when using Data Guard. Do we have to configure the Static Listener SID_LIST Entries under the LISTENER_SCAN* entries in the listener.ora File also?

A: My first guess would be to make sure that your local “static” listener is listed in “local_listener” init.ora parameter. This way Oracle instance would automatically register the local listener to SCAN listeners. A local DB Instance users remote_listener parameter to contact SCAN listeners.

Q2: Another Question regarding EZConnect and Connect Time Failover Is it possible to use EZConnect Method with Load Balancing/Connect Time Failover when using SCAN?

A: I would say that Failover and Load Balancing options are build-in into SCAN concept. You do not need to specify those anymore. You just specify the SCAN connection string as described in my presentation and both features are enabled for your clients by default. For more information on EZConnect Method click HERE. See “Understanding Failover, Load Balancing, and SCAN” for additional information on what is going on the server side of things.

Q3: Is it supported to use the old style connect strings using VIPs in the tnsnames.ora File for connecting to RAC 11gR2?
REF: Understanding the Oracle Real Application Clusters Installed Configuration
“Clients configured to use VIP addresses for Oracle RAC releases prior to Oracle Database 11g release 2 can continue to use their existing connection addresses; using SCAN is not required.”

Question from Yong:

Q: Yury: Do regular and SCAN listeners both have to know node load stats? If yes, isn’t it duplicate?
A: REF Database Services for an Oracle RAC Database.
I think that you are right and the load stats (workload) got registered in both listeners. The only listener that is using the information provided in “proper” SCAN configuration is SCAN listener. However!!! (REF:  previous answer) SCAN doesn’t limit the previous VIP address load balancing configuration on the client side. Oracle registers workload on both SCAN and VIP listeners using service registration process to make both load balancing options available.

Question from Babu Srinivasan:

Q: so if i stop and start .. will it interrrupt the new connections?
A: If you stop start a SCAN listener it will not interrupt existing or new connections. There may be a short time-frame (less than a minute) when SCAN listener got the services related information from local listeners (DB instances). During that time-frame your clients might see the following errors:

"ORA-12514: TNS:listener does not currently know of service requested in connect descriptor"

Question from Babu Srinivasan:

Q: endpoints listener.ora for clusters .. what should be the entries in them .. how it is managed?
A: REF: How Oracle Database Uses the Listener File (listener.ora)
In ideal case you do not edit the listener.ora file nor related local_listener parameter. The endpoints are the ADDRESS part of the listener.ora file. You can create an additional listeners using the following syntax or modify and add additional endpoints to your configuration using srvctl utility.
[sode]srvctl add listener -p TCP:1522 -o /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1
srvctl modify listener -n mynode1 -p “TCP:1521,1522”
srvctl modify listener -l crmlistener -p TCP:1522[/code] However sometimes in emergency cases you may want to implement a “dirty fix” and make the manual adjustments (I did it on couple of occasions). However after got the emergency under control I would strongly suggest you to research on the issue you faced and come with an action plan to convert the setup to the officially supported. Otherwise you may end up with a bigger problems (mess).

Question from Deepak:

Q: What is the problem using “Oracle” user instead of “Grid” – which I thought is really an optionall user during GI install?
A: Well. Strictly speaking there is no problem running both components under the same OS user. However starting from 11GR2 there are much cleaner boundaries in between Grid and Oracle components. If you isolate the Grid services under separate user you protect it from everything else. On the other hand if you have multiple RAC databases (and instances) running on the same host you may want to run those under a separate oracle users. Keeping Grid and Oracle separated makes sense to me after I worked with it on several occasions. However the solution that works in one case may not be suitable for others. If you run a small configuration or/and your DBA/Maintenance team is small (no need to separate responsibilities) you may find that running all under the same user is a better idea. In any circumstances I would keep Cluster and RDBMS oracle homes separate (I am guessing that it isn’t possible to keep those in the same oracle home starting from 11GR12).

Question from David Start:

Q: Have you run into any issues with clients on windows caching the first ip address that dns returns and not round robining
—————————————————————-
A: Yes I do remember some issues related to the fact that some Windows versions cached DNS entries. However I just tested it on my patched XP workstation and don’t see it anymore. I am guessing it is very OS specific. This is a very good point tho and WARNING for others. Please keep this in mind. Some OS in certain circumstances can cache DNS entries. This may prevent your and users from connection to Oracle services in case of one of the 3 SCAN failures.