Services represent groups of applications with common attributes, service level thresholds, and priorities. Application functions can be divided into workloads identified by services. For example, Oracle E-Business Suite can define a service for each responsibility, such as general ledger, accounts receivable, order entry, and so on. A service can span one or more instances of an Oracle database, multiple databases in a global cluster, and a single instance can support multiple services. The number of instances that are serving the service is transparent to the application. Services provide a single system image to manage competing applications, and allow each workload to be managed as a unit.
Middle tier applications and clients select a service by specifying the service name as part of the connection in the TNS connect string. For example, data sources for Oracle WebLogic Server are set to route to a service. Using Net Easy*Connection, this connection comprises simply the service name and network address, as follows: user_name/password@SCAN/service_name. Server-side work such as Oracle Scheduler, Parallel Query, and Oracle Streams queues set the service name as part of the workload definition. For Oracle Scheduler, jobs are assigned to job classes and job classes execute within services. For Parallel Query and Parallel DML, the query coordinator connects to a service and the parallel query slaves inherit the service for the duration of the parallel execution. For Oracle Streams, streams queues are accessed using services. Work executing under a service inherits the thresholds and attributes for the service and is measured as part of the service.
Oracle Database Resource Manager binds services to consumer groups and priorities. This allows the database to manage the services in the order of their importance. For example, the DBA can define separate services for high priority online users and lower priority internal reporting applications. Likewise, the DBA can define Gold, Silver and Bronze services to prioritize the order in which requests are serviced for the same application. When planning the services for a system, the plan should include the priority of each service relative to the other services. In this way, Oracle Database Resource Manager can satisfy the priority-one services first, followed by the priority-two services, and so on.
See Also:
Oracle Database Administrator's Guide for more information about Oracle Database Resource Manager
When users or applications connect to a database, Oracle recommends that you use a service specified in the CONNECT_DATA portion of the connect string. Oracle Database automatically creates one database service when the database is created but the behavior of this service is different from that of database services that you subsequently create. To enable more flexibility in the management of a workload using the database, Oracle Database enables you to create multiple services and specify on which instances (or in which server pools) the services start. If you are interested in greater workload management flexibility, then continue reading this chapter to understand the added features that you can use with services.
Note:
The features discussed in this chapter do not work with the following default database services: DB_NAME, DB_UNIQUE_NAME, PDB_NAME, SYS$BACKGROUND, and SYS$USERS. Oracle strongly recommends that you do not use these services for applications to connect to the database. You must create cluster managed services to take advantage of these features. You can only manage the services that you create. Any service that the database create automatically is managed by the database server.
Dynamic Database Services
Dynamic database services enable you to manage workload distributions to provide optimal performance for users and applications. Dynamic database services offer the following features:
Services: Oracle Database provides a powerful automatic workload management facility, called services, to enable the enterprise grid vision. Services are entities that you can define in Oracle RAC databases that enable you to group database workloads, route work to the optimal instances that are assigned to offer the service, and achieve high availability for planned and unplanned actions.
High Availability Framework: An Oracle RAC component that enables Oracle Database to always maintain components in a running state.
Fast Application Notification (FAN): Provides information to Oracle RAC applications and clients about cluster state changes and Load Balancing Advisory events, such as UP and DOWN events for instances, services, or nodes. FAN has two methods for publishing events to clients, the Oracle Notification Service daemon, which is used by Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) clients including the Oracle Application Server, and Oracle Streams Advanced Queueing, which is used by Oracle Call Interface (OCI) and Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) clients.
Note:
In previous releases of Oracle Clusterware, OCI and ODP.NET clients received FAN events through Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing.
Transaction Guard: A tool that provides a protocol and an API for at-most-once execution of transactions in case of unplanned outages and duplicate submissions.
Application Continuity: Provides a general purpose infrastructure that replays the in-flight request when a recoverable error is received, masking many system, communication, and storage outages, and hardware failures. Unlike existing recovery technologies, this feature attempts to recover the transactional and non-transactional session states beneath the application, so that the outage appears to the application as a delayed execution.
Connection Load Balancing: A feature of Oracle Net Services that balances incoming connections across all of the instances that provide the requested database service.
Load Balancing Advisory: Provides information to applications about the current service levels that the database and its instances are providing. The load balancing advisory makes recommendations to applications about where to direct application requests to obtain the best service based on the management policy that you have defined for that service. Load balancing advisory events are published through Oracle Notification Service.
Automatic Workload Repository (AWR): Tracks service-level statistics as metrics. Server generated alerts can be created for these metrics when they exceed or fail to meet certain thresholds.
Fast Connection Failover: This is the ability of Oracle Clients to provide rapid failover of connections by subscribing to FAN events.
Runtime Connection Load Balancing: This is the ability of Oracle Clients to provide intelligent allocations of connections in the connection pool based on the current service level provided by the database instances when applications request a connection to complete some work.
Single Client Access Name (SCAN): Provides a single name to the clients connecting to Oracle RAC that does not change throughout the life of the cluster, even if you add or remove nodes from the cluster. Clients connecting with SCAN can use a simple connection string, such as a thin JDBC URL or EZConnect, and still achieve the load balancing and client connection failover.
You can deploy Oracle RAC and noncluster Oracle database environments to use dynamic database service features in many different ways. Depending on the number of nodes and your environment's complexity and objectives, your choices for optimal automatic workload management and high-availability configuration depend on several considerations that are described in this chapter.