New redo log sizing advisor in Oracle10g

Oracle 10g has introduced a new advisory utility that allows you to specify your optimal mean time to recovery (MTTR) recovery interval and uses this to suggest the optimal redo log size. In Oracle 10g the fast_start_mttr_target parameter is used.

Oracle recommends using the fast_start_mttr_target initialization parameter to control the duration of startup after instance failure. With 10g, the Oracle database can now self-tune check-pointing to achieve good recovery times with low impact on normal throughput. You no longer have to set any checkpoint-related parameters.

This method reduces the time required for cache recovery and makes the recovery bounded and predictable by limiting the number of dirty buffers and the number of redo records generated between the most recent redo record and the last checkpoint. Administrators specify a target (bounded) time to complete the cache recovery phase of recovery with the fast_start_mttr_target initialization parameter, and Oracle automatically varies the incremental checkpoint writes to meet that target.

The target_mttr field of v$instance_recovery contains the MTTR target in effect. The estimated_mttr field of v$instance_recovery contains the estimated MTTR should a crash happen right away.

For example,

SQL> SELECT TARGET_MTTR, ESTIMATED_MTTR, CKPT_BLOCK_WRITES FROM V$INSTANCE_RECOVERY;

TARGET_MTTR ESTIMATED_MTTR CKPT_BLOCK_WRITES

----------- -------------- -----------------

37 22 209187

Whenever you set fast_start_mttr_target to a nonzero value, and while MTTR advisory is ON, Oracle Corporation recommends that you disable (set to 0) the following parameters:

LOG_CHECKPOINT_TIMEOUT

LOG_CHECKPOINT_INTERVAL

FAST_START_IO_TARGET

Querying the advisor

In addition to the MTTR information in v$instance_recovery we also have an important column called optimal_logfile_size, and we can query for this value at any time. The value for optimal_logfile_size is expressed in megabytes and it changes frequently, based on the DML load on your database. For example,

SQL> SELECT OPTIMAL_LOGFILE_SIZE FROM V$INSTANCE_RECOVERY;

OPTIMAL_LOGFILE_SIZE 

--------------------

256          

If your database is relatively stable, then you can use this suggested size and rebuild your online redo log files to match the value. We would expect that a future version of Oracle will automate this and allow for dynamic re-sizing of online redo log files, but this is an issues because many Oracle systems expect the archived redo log files to always be the same size.