New Functionality in Adaptive Server Enterprise 11.9.2

lock hashtable size

Summary Information
Default value	2048
Range of values	1-2147483647
Status	Static
Display level	Comprehensive
Required role	System Administrator

The lock hashtable size parameter specifies the number of hash buckets in the lock hash table. This table manages all row, page, and table locks and all lock requests. Each time a task acquires a lock, the lock is assigned to a hash bucket, and each lock request for that lock checks the same hash bucket. Setting this value too low results in large numbers of locks in each hash bucket and slows the searches. On Adaptive Servers with multiple engines, setting this value too low can also lead to increased spinlock contention. You should not set the value to less than the default value, 2048.

lock hashtable size must be a power of 2. If the value you specify is not a power of 2, sp_configure rounds the value to the next highest power of 2 and prints an informational message.

The optimal hash table size is a function of the number of distinct objects (pages, tables, and rows) that will be locked concurrently. The optimal hash table size is at least 20 percent of the number of distinct objects that need to be locked concurrently. See “Lock Hash Table Information” for more information on configuring the lock hash table size.

Sybase

We’ve been upgrading a number of Sybase ASE databases from the end-of-life’d 12.5.x to v15.0.3 esd 4 the last few weeks.   My coworker (Degang He) ran into an interesting error when the upgrade process was failing on sysprocedures.

Database ‘my_db’: beginning upgrade step [ID 26]: alter table (table sysprocedures)
Command has been aborted.

Msg 3461, Level 20, State 1:
Server ‘my_server’, Line 1:
Database ‘my_db’: upgrade could not install required upgrade item ’26′. Please refer to previous error messages to determine the problem. Fix the problem, then try again.

Msg 3451, Level 20, State 1:
Server ‘my_server’, Line 1:
Database ‘my_db’: upgrade has failed for this database. Please refer to previous messages for the cause of the failure, correct the problem and try again.

Msg 3454, Level 20, State 1:
Server ‘my_server’, Line 1:

Database ‘my_db’: ASE could not completely upgrade this database; upgrade item 1501 could not be installed.

We looked on Sybase’s Solved Cases and Google but didn’t find anything that would really fit the problem.  So we called up Sybase Technical Support.  Somdev Sharma of Sybase was able to determine that this was a bug in the ASE 15x codeline and provided a workaround:

CR #643188:

Title Online database failed with 3461 error during upgrade , ‘max parallel degree’ >1

Workaround:

Before online the database, disable parallel sort via sp_configure ‘max parallel degree’,1

Sanitized:

Online database failed with 3461, 3451 and 3454 errors during upgrade sysprocedures table (upgrade  item ’26′). If ‘max parallel degree’ > 1, then please disable parallel sort with sp_configure ‘max parallel degree’, 1.

After disabling parallel sort, the database was upgraded successfully.

Sybase

Jeff Tallman replied to a question on how to avoid unnecessary reorgs. He graciously agreed to let me post his response here

You can avoid most (if not all) of the reorgs by doing:

1. setting the exp_row_size to something that covers about 90% of the space each row takes up
2. changing enable housekeeper GC to a 4 or 5

Both of these are a *MUST* do for DOL (datapages or datarows). See manuals on ‘enable housekeeper GC’ for correct setting of 4 or 5 (refers to whether deletes are batch or OLTP).

You can also watch for housekeeper overflows in monEngine/monOpenObjectActivity……and if you see any HKGC pending – wait a few before shutting down.

Jeff wrote up an excellent article, Locking Redux – APL vs. DOL and Tuning, that goes into detail why this is the case.

Now we need to get an updated license file from Sybase as the NIC mac address has changed..   You can *not* use the mac address from the VMware Server on ESX.  grr.

Twenty hours for the volume shadow copy to complete plus another 12 hours to scp the files to the esx box (esx console access is sloooow).   Keep in mind that the host VMware Server box was rebooting itself randomly so I really couldn’t leave it alone.  Then 3 hours to convert/clone the vmdk files and 2 hours to correct the database…  I’m tired.

It turned out to be an issue with allocating 3.75GB to a VM that was causing the rebooting.  Dropping it to 2 GB resolved the rebooting… who knew?  Nothing in Google and VMware Support wasn’t able to find anything on their side.

Jeff Tallman also provided us with the MDA posters for Sybase 15.0.3 last year.

Call the Twitter API from within an Oracle database. ORA_Tweet uses the UTL_HTTP API within Oracle to call the update_status API. It is written completely in PL/SQL.

So, my question is…  Will someone write a Flickr API for Sybase ASE?

QweryBuilder uses innovative ideas to provide developers with the ability to easily insert, extract and modify data from a variety of databases.

The goal of QweryBuilder is to increase a database developer’s productivity. It contains many time saving features.

SQL Editor

QweryBuilder - SQL Editor

• Script auto complete
• Custom auto complete lists
• Code Templates
• Display column list for tables and views in editor
• Display procedure parameters in editor
• Keyboard shortcut to open procedures
• Generate and insert new GUIDs
• Syntax folding
• Auto indenting

Criteria Query

QweryBuilder - Criteria Query

• Form view criteria screen for easy data retrieval
• Updateable result set
  • Insert nulls, GUID’s, and computed values into results
  • Insert, delete and update data rows
  • Generate insert statements from results
  • Create graphs from result data

Graphic Query

QweryBuilder - Graphic Query

• Create queries graphically
• Cross table querying without writing SQL

Other Features

• Support for Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase ASE, SQL Anywhere and Oracle
• DDL Browser
• Database Search
• Visual Difference
• Code Formatter
• Getting Started Window
  • Displays last used connections, files and database objects
  • Easily navigate to the last thing you were working on
• Clipboard Saver
• File Browser
• Object Browser

International Sybase User Group

Over on ISUG‘s SIG-ASE mailing list, Peter Thawley wrote up the following reply that I think everyone using Sybase ASE and is thinking of using a RAM disk should be aware of.  When I asked Peter if I could repost his message on my blog he agreed

Creating a RAM Disk

Peter Thawley

Joe and Shane are spot-on about a task context switching off the engine on an i/o to a RAM-disk based device … and yes Joe, there is nothing you can do about this right now. Normally, one would think of this as a good thing … and it is for that specific user since they get to consume more cpu/engine time thereby getting better response time for their request.

Now, to throw a wrench into this! In these cases where some or all of the database is cached, one does have to be aware of the potential for other user tasks to experience some amount of starvation. Image a bunch of tasks, each consuming a full time slice (100ms by default) before yielding. For systems doing pure OLTP (short) transactions with users getting on an engine and getting off reasonably quickly … little risk of a problem. For mixed workload applications with some OLTP and some DSS/reporting, the potential for starvation is quite real and nearly guaranteed for environments with fully cached DBs. I’ve seen some trading systems in tier 1 investment banks brought to their knees by an innocent IT person deciding to buy a lot of memory to cache the entire DB only to wonder why performance started going to hell. [Of course, it was Sybase's fault ... ( - ; )]

In these cases, be thinking about execution classes/engine groups to segregate OLTP and DSS users onto their own disjoint set of engines using dynamic listeners to keep execution engines and network engines aligned within the same engine groups. You may also want to consider reducing “clock tick length” to keep a timeslice period lower than 100ms … I’ve seen some sites successfully using 50ms and even less … there seems to be little downside since most systems do the async disk io and net io checks a lot more frequently than 100 ms due to the “io polling process count” param.

Just trying to present a balanced view here …. This is going to be important for more people to consider as in-memory database techniques and/or features / products become more prevalent.

Peter
_____________________________________

Peter Thawley
Senior Director / Architect
CTO Group, WMO
Sybase, Inc.

The current version (ASE 11.0.3.3 ESD#6) package is different from previous distribution of ASE 11.0.3.3. The

Sybase

new package separates ASE and OC/OS SDK. Also OC/OS is now available for Alpha platform. You can also find FreeBSD version of the package. Intel, Alpha and FreeBSD releases differ only in packaging and they are all built from the same source.

Software is FREE for development as well as Deployment.

Adaptive Server Enterprise 11.0.3.3 ESD#6 for Linux runs on Linux systems with Kernel 2.2.12 and glibc-2.1.2-11 installed. Verify that your system meets the hardware/software requirements before installing the software.

ASE 11.0.3.3 Linux download and install instructions from Europe site.

To install Linux ASE 11.0.3.3 software:

• Download the following packages. The downloadable image are in RPM (Linux) or GNU-zipped tar (FreeBSD) format for the available different platforms.
  Linux Intel
  sybase-ase-11.0.3.3-6.i386.rpm – ASE (run-time) 20MB archive, 70MB installed
  sybase-ocsd-10.0.4-6.i386.rpm – OCSD (software dev kit) 19MB archive, 60MB installed
  sybase-doc-11.0.3.3-6.i386.rpm – DOC (PostScript and html) 9MB archive, 40MB installed

  Linux Alpha

  sybase-ocsd-10.0.4-5.alpha.rpm – OCSD (software dev kit) 18MB archive, 56MB installed
  sybase-doc-11.0.3.3-5.alpha.rpm – DOC (PostScript and html) 9MB archive, 40MB installed

  FreeBSD with Linux ABI installed (The SDK is native)

  sybase-ase-11.0.3.3-FreeBSD-i386.tgz – ASE (run-time) 20MB archive, 70MB installed
  sybase-ocsd-10.0.4-FreeBSD-i386.tgz – OCSD (FreeBSD native SDK) 9MB archive, 30MB installed
  sybase-doc-11.0.3.3-FreeBSD-i386.tgz – DOC (PostScript and html) 9MB archive, 40MB installed
• Download Cover Letter and follow the instructions. After extracting the software README files in various directories, $SYBASE/CONFIGURE and $SYBASE/doc/howto/howto-ase-quickstart.html provide more information to install and configure the product

An Informatica product manager Informed me they were considering dropping support for ASE as a repository. Please contact me if you run Informatica and have ASE as a repository.

Joe Buhl
BT Conferencing
joe.buhl@bt.com

I can only hope that the product manager was either misinformed or that Informatica can be convinced to retain support for Sybase ASE as a repository.

The issues tend to be simple ones such as, “select * from my_table limit 10″ to retrieve the first 10 rows not working.  Using “select top 10 col1,col2,….coln from my_table” will.

So how can you help?  Very easily!   The CakePHP website shows us how:

Because of a bug within the Sybase ODBC install, we need to change /opt/sybase/DataAccess/ODBC/samples/drivertemplate.txt.

/opt/sybase/DataAccess/ODBC/samples/drivertemplate.txt:

Change to:

This template file is used to install the ODBC driver with unixODBC:

Currently Sybase’s ODBC driver does not have a GUI component for unixODBC. I’m waiting on the bug #. Once I have it, I’ll update this post.

Now we are ready to define an ODBC dsn. We will need to create a template file to do so:

dbadev1.dsn

To add it to unixODBC we need to run:

If you wanted a system wide dsn:

Ryan Putnam: How to upgrade Sybase ASE 12.5 to ASE 15

Hi,
I have attached a sample ASE 15 upgrade document which I had created for version 12.5 and have made changes for our version 15 upgrades.  I don’t know if it will help anyone, but I seem to recall a few people asking for some documentation.  Hopefully it can be used as a template?  Anyways, you are welcome to look at it, clone it, get ideas, or whatever.

Enjoy,
Thanks,
Ryan

ASE 15.0.3 MDA table diagram

Thanks Jeff for creating them!

This issue contains:

• Sybase IQ and Sybase WorkSpace Part II By Mike Crocker
• Perl in the shell By Jason Froebe
• Taming the process nightmare: Consolidating a Horde of Process Diagrams with PowerDesigner By Mike Nicewarner
• Information overload: Weapons-grade data analysis comes of age By Teresa Foster
• Maximizing PowerBuilder and SQLAnywhere Part III SQLAnywhere, a PowerBuilder Developer’s perspective
  By Chris Pollach
• select random (stuff) from SYBASE Command shell by proxy By Bill Grant
• Mobile Enterprise Everywhere: Taking Sybase on the road By Adrian Bridgwater
• Sybase TechWave 2008: Time for the technology tsunami

You need to be an ISUG member to receive the ISUG Technical Journal.  Join ISUG today!

International Sybase User Group

MyDatabases Volume 1 Issue 1

Geek Spotlight:  Michael Peppler
Sybase ASE on Ubuntu 8.04
Multicore Processors
VMware Virtualization
Logical Process Manager

3347 Allow for load with no_data into a smaller database
3090 Maintenance user update only for replicate database in warm standby.
3351 Add suid argument to sp_addlogin
3053 Allow for dropping of an audit table
3257 Change MDA datatypes to unsigned 2/4/8 byte integer

International Sybase Users Group

s
3252 J2EE connector for ASE
3125 grantable create/drop index
3092 Getting stats about the total amount of log generated by a query
3057 sp_add_resource_limit works now for the datasegment for tempdb, extends also for the log segment
3277 The MDA table monSysStatement PagesModified volumn is always 0
3088 Extract SQL statements from ASE log
3099 Provide a “zero-fill” function – or more generic “fill” function
3118 Concurrency issue
3133 Allow computed columns to be defined in terms of another computed column(s)
2452 Allow ASE Replicator login to be aliased to ‘dbo’.
3355 # tables / Stored Procedures managment
3273 add support for CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and CURRENT_USER ANSI standard features
3228 sp_dboption ‘no auditing’
3354 Stored Procedure Complilation
3286 Allow UDF to reference another UDF which hasn’t been created yet.
3323 Introduce array structures (varying arrays) and user-defined object datatypes
3234 generic function/procedure parameters
3325 Ability to store and extract sql for jTDS stored procedures
3453 Collect MDA stats at the stored procedure level
3376 Implement ANSI SQL-99 “WITH clause” in SELECT statement
3408 Allow creation of stored procs refereencing #tables when #tables don’t exist
3416 Handle ‘LIKE’ as effectively as ‘=’ when no pattern matching performed
3404 force load
3434 Less restrictive login name rules
3417 LDAP – Allow authentication to multiple domains on a per account basis
3377 Add windowing analytic clause in aggregates for complex calculations
3331 Enforce ANSI limitations on GROUP BY
3345 Allow output of ASE 15 optmizer diagnostics to client without DBCC TRACEON(3604)
3429 Release ASE for MAC OSX Intel
3449 Add CREATE [TEMPORARY] SEQUENCE to T-SQL
3375 Add GREATEST() and LEAST() built-in list functions
3450 Allow builtins/UDFs as arguments to SPs/UDFs
2067 Sybase Engineering’s Proposed CR #270078
3440 Implement Multiversion Consistency/Concurrency Control (MVCC)
3419 Support compiler directives in T-SQL procedures/functions
3403 New Feature Request to handle Money format for Indian Currency(Fetaure Request 447294)

Jeff hits the nail on the head.  You have a voice with the ISUG enhancements process. Use it.  And yes, you have to be paid member to vote. Sorry, but we are a non-profit and your membership fees keep us running!  You can vote as a Basic Member – you do not need to join at the higher membership levels (but you should so you can read all the wonderful articles Jeff writes for us).  The more votes, the easier it is for engineering to justify spending staff resources on it when they go to management.  Encourage all of your peers to join and vote as well.  If you work for a business with several Sybase users, convince your boss to pay for a corporate membership and get all your colleagues to vote as well.

Regards,

Mike Harrold
Executive Director

and

Having an “internal enhancement” (aka a CR) doesn’t mean it gets implemented.  It means there’s a CR for it.  It might be a great idea, but without backing (and a user request + an engineer doesn’t mean it has backing; look how long it took for UDFs, mathematical functions, etc.) it doesn’t get allocated any development resources.  Without development resources, it doesn’t get implemented.

Bottom line, a CR doesn’t mean it’s a “planned” feature.

Regards,

Mike Harrold
Executive Director
International Sybase User Group

I would recommend voting for the ISUG enhancements (this week).  I and several other ISUG Board members will be going through the ISUG enhancements this weekend to present a subset to Sybase product management at TechWave next month.

I haven’t seen many ISUG enhancements being requested lately or voted upon for that matter.  The higher the votes for a particular enhancement, the more likely Sybase will pick it up.

So please, everyone go vote on the ISUG enhancements!

It would allow us to do things like pgTAP with ease..  Check out the slides for pgTAP

just my opinion… grrrr

I’ve created ISUG enhancement request # 3449 for this.

I am working on a future version of ASE and am interested in hearing about your experiences with the logical process manager (LPM).  LPM consists of engine groups and execution classes, as well as the ability to set spid priority in an ad-hoc manner via sp_setpsexe.  This functionality is sometimes referred to as application queues.

If you have used this feature I’d like to know:

• What was the use case (in other words, why did you use it)?
• What elements did you use?  How did you use it?
• Did it meet your needs?  Did you run into problems?
• Any shortcomings or requirements that weren’t met?
• What was your overall impression?

If you evaluated the functionality but chose not to use it, please let me know what you were trying to accomplish and why you decided against using LPM.

Finally, if you have use cases or requirements around managing multiple applications in a single ASE server, or managing the priority / resources of specific spids, please pass those along.  Unaddressed use cases are extremely useful to hear about.

Please provide your feedback directly to me at david.wein@sybase.com, and include “logical process manager feedback” in the mail subject (I get a lot of mail and this will help make sure I don’t miss your mail!).  Please be as detailed and specific as you can about your use cases and results.

Thanks a bunch,
Dave

Let’s help Dave, and ourselves, out by giving him our experiences with the logical process manager.  Please be descriptive as “it sucks” or “it’s great” doesn’t really help.

If anyone wants to post their experiences to this blog post, that’s okay too.  I’ll forward any comments to Dave.