Learned a couple things this week

We had a couple examples of how a high watermark affects FTS, especially when that FTS gets executed on the wrong side of a FILTER operation. Which got me to delving into the black magic of high water marks.

First off, Oracle only mentions them in passing. If you search for LHWM (low high water mark), you will get a couple hits in metalink for a bug and nothing in the documentation. So, what the heck is a low high watermark anyway? And a high high watermark?

Apparently, after a couple lessons from K Gopalakrishna, Ric Van Dyke and couple others, the LHWM is the boundary at which all blocks below it are gauranteed to be formatted and used at least once. Above the HHWM we are gauranteed that all blocks are unformatted and never used. Between the two we have the "grey area"; namely, a mixture of blocks that have and have not been used. I believe there are two bitmaps (or two levels of bitmaps?), one that maintains the freelists for below the LWHM, and another for above the HHWM. On Full Table Scans, Oracle will scan everything below the LHWM, and then use the L2 bitmap to find blocks that need to be scanned above the LHWM.

Oracle seems to have gone to great lenghts to make these two watermarks as confusing as possible. In the documentation, and when using packages like dbms_space, we are led to believe there is only one HWM, even for an ASSM tablespace.

Thankfully, folks have discovered "dump file". Norman Dunbar gives a couple quick examples. This is good stuff; there is a lot in the dump files that would warrant a closer look. But for right now, let's look at the watermark bits of information:
alter system dump datafile 5 block min 1 block max 100;

Extent Control Header
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Extent Header:: spare1: 0 spare2: 0 #extents: 1 #blocks: 8
last map 0x00000000 #maps: 0 offset: 2716
Highwater:: 0x01403030 ext#: 1 blk#: 7 ext size: 8
#blocks in seg. hdr's freelists: 0
#blocks below: 7809
mapblk 0x00000000 offset: 1
Disk Lock:: Locked by xid: 0x000a.013.000003a4
--------------------------------------------------------
Low HighWater Mark :
Highwater:: 0x01403030 ext#: 992 blk#: 7 ext size: 8
#blocks in seg. hdr's freelists: 0
#blocks below: 7809
mapblk 0x01402aa1 offset: 177
Level 1 BMB for High HWM block: 0x01403019
Level 1 BMB for Low HWM block: 0x01403019

This is not necessarily the world's best example, but heck, it is raw data. =) I have yet to decipher what all that means, but I am working on it. I believe that the LHWM "blocks below" will always be less than the HHWM "blocks below", but the difference would count the number of blocks in that grey area.

As an aside, I also found that you can dump all the file headers with:
alter session set events 'immediate trace name file_hdrs level 10';

The level is a bit confusing, as I tried various numbers and the resulting trace seem to be exactly the same.

On the RMAN side, we came across a peculiar curiosity. With no recovery catalog, if you recover a controlfile and have archive logs beyond the time of the controlfile, we found that on OSEE 10.2.0.1, RMAN is not smart enough to roll forward if you specify an "UNTIL TIME" in the future relative to the controlfile. Instead, you will see errors that resemble messages if the backup is corrupted; RMAN will attempt to go backwards in time to find a file that matches an appropiate SCN. Of course, it will never find one. This behavior is "fixed" in OSEE 10.2.0.4 (we did not try any of the intermediate patch levels), and RMAN will now roll the database forward beyond the controlfile time.