Oracle8i™ Database Resource Manager

Features Overview
February 1999

DESCRIPTION

Oracle8i provides powerful tools to manage and simplify database management. The ability to
easily and accurately perform system and resource management is crucial to maintaining
application and database performance, scalability, and availability. One of the most important
new tools in Oracle8i is a Database Resource Manager. The Database Resource Manager ensures
system resources are applied to the most important tasks of the enterprise at the levels required to
meet enterprise goals.

SYSTEM AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Availability of the database encompasses both its functionality and performance. If the database
is available, but users are not getting the level of performance they need, availability and service
level objectives are not being met. Application performance and availability are impacted by
how resources are distributed to the various applications accessing the database. In Oracle8i, a
sophisticated Database Resource Manager is used to allocate and manage CPU resources among
database users and applications. In addition, the Database Resource Manager enables the
administrator to limit the degree of parallelism of any operation. It is possible to balance one
user’s resource consumption against other users and to partition system resources among tasks of
varying importance to achieve overall enterprise goals.
 Database
Resource Manager
OLTP OLTP updates and queries:
User high priority

DSS
User
DSS queries:
medium priority

Batch Batch:
Processing low priority

Database Users and Applications Benefit from a

Sophisticated Database Resource Manager

ESTABLISHING RESOURCE PLANS AND POLICIES

Resources are allocated to users based on a plan specified by the database administrator. User
sessions and groups of user sessions are assigned to resource consumer groups. Resource
consumer groups are separate from user roles. This separation allows one user to have different
sessions assigned to different resource consumer groups. An overall resource plan is defined
specifying how resources are distributed among the different resource consumer groups. Plans
within plans, or subplans can be defined. Subplans allow the further subdivision of CPU
resources within a resource consumer group. Up to eight levels of resource allocation can be
defined. Levels allow the further subdivision of CPU resources between resource consumer
groups. Levels are used to specify resource consumer group allocation limits and how unused
resources should be distributed. Subplans and levels can be used together. These capabilities
allow very simple, yet powerful allocation policies to be implemented for database resources.

DATABASE RESOURCE MANAGER FUNCTIONALLY

Company XYZ sells widgets directly to customers over the Internet. In order to assure optimum
performance for customers placing orders, 80 percent of the CPU is allocated to service customer
orders. The remainder of the CPU resource is divided between the processing required to ship the
widgets and bill for them. To implement this resource policy the following plan is created.

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 Company XYZ Resource Plan

Resource CPU
Consumer Resource
Groups Allocations

Web-Based
80%
Order Entry

Shipping 15%

Billing 5%

The previous resource plan can be refined by specifying how resources are allocated between
different classes of customers or how resources are allocated within a resource consumer group.
The XYZ company categorizes their customers into two groups based on their purchase volume
(premium and standard). In order to ensure a higher level of service to the their premium
customers, an order entry subplan is created. The order entry subplan dictates how resources
allocated to the order entry resource consumer group are subdivided. In this case, premium
customers are allocated 60 percent of the order entry resources and the standard customers are
allocated the remaining 40 percent.

Order Entry Subplan

Resource CPU
Consumer Resource
Groups Allocations

Premium
60%
Customers

Standard
40%
Customers

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Using a subplan is different than creating two different order entry resource consumer groups in
the primary plan. If that were done, any resources allocated but not used by the standard
customers would be distributed across all the other resource consumer groups. With the order
entry subplan, resources unused by the standard customers are made available to the premium
customers before making them available to other resource consumer groups. It is also possible to
create additional subplans to benefit premium customers with priority shipping and billing
resources.

This resource plan can be refined by specifying how unused resources are allocated between
resource consumer groups. The XYZ company wants to ensure that at least five percent of the
resources are always available to service the billing functions. They also want any unused
resources from order entry and shipping made available to billing. This is accomplished by
placing the order entry and shipping resource consumer groups in one level and the billing
resource consumer group in a second level.

Company XYZ Resource Plan

Resource Level 1 CPU Level 2 CPU

Consumer Resource Resource
Groups Allocations Allocations

Web-Based
80% 0%
Order Entry

Shipping 15% 0%

Billing 0% 100%

While this revised plan may appear to provide the same allocation of resources as the first plan, it
is different. Unused resources allocated to the order entry or shipping resource consumer group
are made available to the billing resource consumer group. The levels also establish a maximum
level of CPU consumption for the order entry and shipping resource consumer groups. In the first
plan, unused resources from any one consumer group are proportionally divided between the
other resource consumer groups.

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FLEXIBLE AND ADAPTABLE RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

The only constant is change. Resource plans and policies that achieve the desired results in the
morning, may not in the evening. All aspects of the Database Resource Manager may be changed
while the database is running without shutting down and restarting the database. Plans, subplans,
levels, membership in resource consumer groups, and resource allocations can be dynamically
altered on a production database without quiesceing the system.

The database administrator can create many different plans and resource consumer groups. These
definitions are stored in the data dictionary. A default plan specified by the administrator is
activated when the database is started. This allows alternate plans for day time, night time,
weekends, quarter end or other times that require a different set of priorities.

Unlike conventional priority schemes, all resource consumer groups will receive, if required, their
allotment of resources and cannot be starved by a high demand for resources from other resource
consumer groups. Using percentages to allocate CPU resources ensures this. In addition, it
allows the resource allocation policies to remain static across hardware changes to the computer
system that the database runs on.

DATABASE INTEGRATION

The Database Resource Manager is fully integrated into the database security system. A
PL/SQL™ package is supplied that allows the administrator to create, update, and delete resource
plans and resource consumer groups. The administrator defines a user’s default consumer group
and what privileges the user has. A users or his or her session can switch resource consumer
groups to increase execution priority if the user has been granted the privilege to switch to that
consumer group. In addition, users can be moved from group to group by the administrator on a
production system dynamically changing how CPU resources are used.

Oracle continues to support user resource limits and profiles used with the Database Resource
Manager. While the Database Resource Manager balances different requests for service against
each other within the defined resource allocation plan, profiles are used to implement hard limits
on a user’s consumption of resources.

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Lastly, the Database Resource Manager and the Oracle8i automatic degree of parallelism
(ADOP) feature have been integrated. ADOP attempts to optimize system utilization by
automatically adjusting the degree of parallelism for parallel query operations. ADOP takes into
account resource consumer group allocations before choosing a degree of parallelism to ensure
CPU targets are met.

CONCLUSION

Previously, all users and applications were provided equal access to the database. While this
works in many cases, some activities in the enterprise are more important and mission-critical than
others. The Database Resource Manager in Oracle8i allows policies to be implemented that
guarantee measured database service to enterprise applications and users. These resource
management policies make it easier to deliver predictable service levels while remaining flexible
to support changing business needs.

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Copyright © Oracle Corporation 1999

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