Ilmar Kerm

Oracle, databases, Linux and maybe more

Here you can see some small snippets how to return quite a lot of useful attributed about Oracle database directly from CRS. And the code I use to do an automated RAC rolling restart.

When instance fails in Oracle RAC, the services that were using this instance as a preferred instance are automatically relocated to instances marked as available for this service. But after the failed instance recovers and starts up again, the relocated services are not moved back and need manual srvctl relocate service command from administrator to move them back.

Here is a little Bash script to automate this process. Oracle Clusterware (Grid Infrastructure) can execute user callout scripts on FAN events, like INSTANCE up/down. Place this script under $GRID_HOME/racg/usrco/ and set the execute bits on the file. Then clusterware will execute that script for all FAN events, but the script will start processing only for instance up event.

Why is it needed? We just switched over to 4-node RAC consisting of many different applications, almost each of them connecting to its own schema. We created each application its own service restricting it to 1 (or max 2) nodes (1 or 2 nodes as preferred, all other nodes listed as available). After the first rolling patching, I noticed that the connection count and load on each node was very unbalanced, vast majority of the connections were connected to node1 and the last patched node had almost none and it did not get better over a few hours. This was because most of the services ended up on node1 and I had to manually look over each service and relocate it back where it belongs. This script attempts to automate this process.

Tested on Oracle Linux 5.8 with Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.3 and Oracle Database 11.2.0.2 and 11.2.0.3.