Oracle Real Application Clustering






What is Real Application Clustering?

Oracle Real Application Clustering (RAC) uses Transparent Application Failover (TAF) which is a protocol within Oracle whereby, if a connection to a database node fails, it can be re-established against an alternative node.



Once a broken connection has failed-over, an application can continue without any special action on its part. However, TAF does not restore all facets of a connection. For instance, TAF does not:

If any of these situations apply to a failed connection, an application may need to take action following failover to return the connection fully to the desired state. In order to do this, the application may request to be notified when failover has occurred. Both the "Lite" Edition and the "Enterprise" Edition Generic Client provide this facility through TAF event notifications.

The "Lite" Edition ODBC Driver and the "Enterprise" Edition Database Agent both enable configuration of the failover retry interval and the maximum number of failover retries, in the event that failover is not successful on the first attempt.

How to Configure UDA to use Oracle Real Application Clustering

Single-Tier "Lite" Edition on Unix-like OS

  1. Log in to the machine that hosts the Single-Tier (Lite) drivers.
  2. Use a text editor to open the openlink.ini ($OPENLINKINI) file that resides in the bin sub-directory of the Single-Tier installation.
  3. Locate the [Environment Oracle 10.x] section.
  4. Create and set the following two variables: 


    OPL_TAF_MAX_RETRIES    = 10    ; This is the maximum number of times that the driver will retry the connection.
OPL_TAF_RETRY_INTERVAL = 5     ; This is the number of seconds that the driver will wait between connection attempts.

  5. Save your changes and exit the file.


Single-Tier "Lite" Edition on Windows


  1. Log in to the machine that hosts the Single-Tier "Lite" Edition drivers.
  2. Launch your ODBC Data Sources Administrator.
  3. Locate the relevant DSN.
  4. Click the Configure button.
  5. Scroll through the configuration screens until you find the "Enable TAF" checkbox.
  6. Check the TAF checkbox to prompt the driver to attempt multiple failover connections to alternative DBMS nodes.
  7. Configure the rest of the fields related to TAF:
    • Maximum Retries - This is the maximum number of times that the driver will retry the connection.
    • Retry Interval (secs) - This is the number of seconds that the driver will wait between connection attempts.


Multi-Tier "Enterprise" Edition on any OS

  1. Log in to the machine that hosts the Multi-Tier server components installation.
  2. Use a text editor to open the oplrqb.ini file that resides in the bin sub-directory of the Multi-Tier installation.
  3. Locate the [Environment ORACLE10] section.
  4. Create and set the following two variables: 


    OPL_TAF_MAX_RETRIES    = 10    ; This is the maximum number of times that the driver will retry the connection.
OPL_TAF_RETRY_INTERVAL = 5     ; This is the number of seconds that the driver will wait between connection attempts.

  5. Save your changes and exit the file.
  6. Restart the Request Broker.


Programmatic Considerations

Our ODBC drivers notify ODBC applications that failover has occurred using two mechanisms: event call-backs and SQLSTATEs.

TAF Event Notification: Call-backs

An application can register a failover call-back routine by setting the proprietary connection attribute SQL_ATTR_EVENT_CALL-BACK (1280) on an open connection. The routine's address is supplied as the value of SQLSetConnectAttr's ValuePtr argument. The same call-back routine can be registered for more than one connection. The call-back routine's signature must take the form: 

void (*call-back) (oplevent_t   oplEvent, 
                   SQLHANDLE    handle, 
                   SQLUSMALLINT eventInfo)


where:

oplEvent is of type oplevent_t, an enumerated type enumerating the types of events reported to event call-backs. oplevent_t is defined as follows: 

typedef enum 
  {
    OPL_EV_NONE             = 0, 
    OPL_EV_FAILOVER_SUCCESS = 16, 
    OPL_EV_FAILOVER_ABORT   = 17 
  }
  oplevent_t;


At the moment, only failover events are supported through the OPL_EV_FAILOVER_xxx event class. Other types of event may be supported in the future using this call-back mechanism. OPL_EV_FAILOVER_SUCCESS indicates that failover was successful, OPL_EV_FAILOVER_ABORT that failover was aborted.

context is the ODBC handle (HDBC) of the connection for which the application wishes to receive event notifications. This handle should be supplied to the ODBC driver when the call-back is registered, using another Oracle-specific connection attribute, SQL_ATTR_EVENT_CONTEXT (1281). If this attribute is not set, the call-back receives SQL_NULL_HANDLE for the handle argument. (If other event types are supported in the future, this attribute may accept other types of ODBC handle, e.g., handles of type SQL_HANDLE_STMT, depending on the scope of the event.)

eventInfo is reserved for future use. All failover events currently return 0.

TAF Event Notification: SQLSTATEs

In addition to being informed of failover through a call-back routine, an ODBC application also receives notification through SQLSTATEs. After failover completes, the first ODBC call to return on the affected connection can return one of two proprietary SQLSTATEs, IM500 or IM501:

If the ODBC call returning the failover SQLSTATE fails for some reason, a diagnostic record holding the failover SQLSTATE and message is appended to any diagnostic records already generated by the failing call. In this case, even if failover was successful, a SQLSTATE IM500 may be accompanied by a function return code of SQL_ERROR. For instance, if a transaction was open at the time failover took place, SQLExecute() may return SQL_ERROR with two diagnostic records, for example:

Note: Failover notification using TAF-specific SQLSTATEs cannot be used independently of failover call-backs. The use of these SQLSTATEs is only triggered when an application registers a failover call-back.


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