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May 4th

Question and Answer

Connor McDonald

Thanks for the question, Neil.

Asked: January 21, 2020 - 9:55 am UTC

Last updated: January 22, 2020 - 8:39 am UTC

Version: 11.2.0.4 Standard Edition x64

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You Asked

Hello!

I have a customer currently running Oracle Database 11g Standard Edition Release 11.2.0.4.0 64-bit on Oracle Linux 7.6 on physical hosts with multi-threaded CPUs. They are aware of the situation with the support for 11g and wish to upgrade to 18c or 19c imminently. However, they are aware of the 16 CPU thread limit imposed by SE2's licensing and wish therefore to test performance of their 11g databases under the SE2 CPU thread limit.

On a test VM with 4 vCPUs I have tried setting a test database's CPU_COUNT parameter to 2 and then starting 20 SQL*Plus sessions using the following code to induce load on the CPUs:

(
TWO_TASK=//VMORACLE/db11g sqlplus sys/******** as sysdba <<END
alter session set plsql_optimize_level=0;
exec loop null; end loop;
END
)&


However, this test proved inconclusive as 'top' showed that all 4 CPUs were being used.

How can the customer limit their current 11g databases to SE2's 16 CPU thread limit so they can evaluate performance of their databases and be reasonably certain of the expected performance (with regard to CPU usage) when they come to upgrade to 18c or 19c?

Many thanks in anticipation...

Neil Garside

and Connor said...

Have you met the requirements of instance caging?

You need to set CPU_COUNT and have a resource manager plan set.

Check this white paper

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/performance/instance-caging-wp-166854.pdf

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Comments

Thanks for the prompt answer!

Neil Garside, January 22, 2020 - 10:13 am UTC

Thanks for the prompt answer. However, my understanding is that Resource Manager can only be used with Enterprise Edition. Am I able to utilise Resource Manger with 11g Standard Edition?

Many thanks,

Neil Garside

A reader, January 22, 2020 - 1:32 pm UTC

https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/performance/resource-manager-twp-133705.pdf

above PDF says

"1
In Oracle Database 11g, Resource Manager can also be used with Standard Edition with the out-ofbox “default_maintenance_plan” to manage maintenance tasks. "

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