The last weeks I discovery a behave of the engine what is something new
for me.
I believe others will be surprised too...

IFX 11.50 FC9

When you restore an archive with logical logs , maybe you needed the
files/tapes of logical logs backuped before the Archive Level 0.

The reason is open transactions.

I have a situation here where for some reason a session keep they
transaction opened up to 4 hours (probably a application failure over
the control of the transaction). When was executed the Archive Level 0
this sessions was idle (with TX open) from 3 hour before.
The "lag" between the logical log what this TX was opened and Archive
are take is at least 100 Logical Logs (30 MB each = 3GB of Logs).

So, during the restore the engine request all logical logs since this
open TX.

The engine include this logical logs on the archive and show the number
of this logs when the Archive Level 0 is finished, anyway you still
needed the tapes/files created before this archive to restore the
logical backuped after this archive.

e.g. when the the archive bellow start running, the current log is
129634 , the log 129537 was backuped 5 hours early. If I try restore
this Archive with logical logs, the engine will request the files/tapes
since log 129537.

Please enter the level of archive to be performed (0, 1, or 2) 0
Please mount tape 1 on /dev/rmt0 and press Return to continue ...
10 percent done.
20 percent done.
30 percent done.
40 percent done.
50 percent done.
60 percent done.
70 percent done.
80 percent done.
100 percent done.
Read/Write End Of Medium enabled: blocks = 307955
Please label this tape as number 1 in the arc tape sequence.
This tape contains the following logical logs:
129537 - 129634
Program over.

A PMR was opened over this behave and answered as expected behave. Was
created a APAR over the documentation (this behave wasn't documented
before).

So, if you have any policy of discarding logical logs backups take
before your Archive... beware .

Regards
Cesar

if a paralel backup was taken i can understand it, however it seems to
be an ontape and
afaik you need the llogs since the lvl 0.
i would say you are looking at a bug here not a doc bug but a real
bug,,,,


Superboer.


On 20 jan, 12:52, Cesar Inacio Martins
<cesar_inacio_mart... (AT) yahoo (DOT) com.br> wrote:

Hi,

sorry that it took me quite a while to pick up on this
topic ... but here's an attempt to answer some of
the questions:

- Cesar Inacio described the existing behavior correctly.
It is really the case that upon logical log restore the
oldest log file to be restored is the one that contains
the BEGIN WORK log record of the oldest transaction
that is (still) open at the time of the level-0 archive
checkpoint. As such, this log file can be much older
than the level-0 archive itself.
- This is not new behavior. It has been like that since a
long time (some say since 1988 and that's most
probably correct). At least I confirmed, that a 7.31.UD8
from 2004 had exactly this behavior.

- For a level-0 archive to be restorable without logical log
restore, logical log records needed to make the restore
logically consistent are contained within the level-0 archive.
This is especially needed for the cases where logical logs
are never backed up but only discarded (think of LTAPEDEV
in the onconfig file set to /dev/null).
These needed logical log records are applied after the
physical restore (which is the copying of pages from tape
to chunks on disk) when transactions were open at the
time of the level-0 archive checkpoint. Applying these
logical log records rolls back those open transactions and
such makes the restore logically consistent.

- If the physical restore of a level-0 archive is to be followed
by a logical restore, the space where logical log files reside
in the chunks on disk is cleared before doing the logical log
restore. This step is done to ensure that no obsolete log
record data or otherwise corrupt data is lingering in the log
space (in chunks on disk). After this clearing, all the needed
logical log files must be restored, including those that contain
log records of an open transaction that started before the
level-0 archive checkpoint.
[ It already has been discussed in this email thread, that
these old log files may be needed to roll back the open
transactions if they are not committed during the log roll
forward. ]

- The remaining question now is: Why then is this clearing
of the log space so important before starting the log restore?
The reason here is the way how the logical roll forward is
implemented (and this again is an implementation that always
was like this and has not changed recently). The logical roll
forward is processing the log records sequentially and after
each processed log record it is looking on disk whether there
are more log records to be processed. The end of the logical
roll forward is reached when the next logical log file page on
disk is all zero. And here is the catch: without the clearing of
logical log space before the restore of log files, some
"garbage data" may still be left over on disk (that also was not
overwritten by the physical restore phase). Such "garbage data"
may trick the logical roll forward into finding and applying
obsolete "stuff" after the last proper log record.
There are mainly three scenarios that can ensue when the
logical roll forward encounters "garbage data" on disk after the
last valid and correct log record:
- the log roll forward would recognize the garbage as garbage
and correctly end the log roll forward. This is the good case.
- the log roll forward would think that there is a valid log
record, but when attempting to apply it gets completely
corrupted and cannot recover from this. In this case the
log roll forward would just stop and leave the system in a
hopelessly inconsistent state, making the whole restore a failure.
- the log rollforward would apply obsolete log records successfully.
This probably would be a rare, but possible case, especially when
there were old log files on that part of the disk before the restore.
Even though the restore may well finish, this would probably be
the worst case, as data has been corrupted without any notice.

- As all this is not new behavior but was 'always' like this, there
is not much motivation to change it, at least not for the time
being. The current implementation is rather stable and reliable
(since quite a few years), an important attribute for the
backup and restore functionality. Improvements to avoid the
need of restoring those old log files would require medium level
redesign and implementation of otherwise reliably working code,
adding a real risk for introducing new problems and making the
code unstable (at least for some time) - a prospect that many
customers probably would not be happy with ...

- Some years ago we also discussed the possibility of making the
checking for the validity of a log page found on disk much
stronger than it currently is. Also this would require redesign
and reimplementation, but additionally also diminish performance
during normal operation. The logging itself would have to create
more redundant data, adding it to the log records or the log
pages, so that later the checks can be more assuring. More
redundant data also means bigger log records and hence
more I/O when writing them (to disk). At the time of these
discussions, the costs involved were clearly deemed far
outweighing the possible benefits.

Long response, I know ... :-)
But I hope it can clarify some things and give some background
info for better understanding ... which hopefully can help with
accepting the current implementation. At first sight it may look
quite dumb, but after all there is some thinking behind it.

Regards, Martin
--
Martin Fuerderer
IBM Informix Development Munich, Germany
Information Management

Read about the Informix Warehouse Accelerator:
http://tinyurl.com/the-iwa-blog

IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
Chairman of the Supervisory Board: Martina Koederitz
Board of Management: Dirk Wittkopp
Corporate Seat: Boeblingen, Germany
Reg.-Gericht: Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 243294

informix-list-bounces (AT) iiug (DOT) org wrote on 01/20/2012 12:52:01 PM:

Hello Martin,

thanks for the info, i did not bump into this issue until this
message; one is never too old to learn i guess and yes i
started my old indy to check this against an old V7 engine: this one
did clear serial if i recall correctly
V93 and higher clear parallel.

Anyways I am a bit supprised here since the info needed is on disk.
I know the logs need to be cleared however it could be cleared around
the logs which are in the lvl 0 archive.

the answer is probably do not fix what is not broken, a much hated
comment on
things which are not perfect.

See you

Superboer.

On 24 jan, 13:23, Martin Fuerderer <MARTI... (AT) de (DOT) ibm.com> wrote:

Yes, the clearing of logical log space first was done single threaded,
then (around 2001, I think) we parallelized it to speed it up.

The "problem" is, that this clearing always was done in such a way that
afterwards some logs may need to be restored, even though the needed
log records were there before the log clearing. Changing something
that always worked that way, especially in a sensitive code area, is
not easy. Hence the "don't touch working code" attitude ...

You (i.e. any customer with a Support contract, or the IIUG as a whole)
can put forward the desire to get this improved ... via a feature request.
But neither do I have any say in the backup and restore area these days,
nor could I give any estimate as to when such a project would be taken on.
You'd have to try ...

[ On a rather personal matter:
Despite the knowledge of me writing to the IIUG Forum I was told
recently, that I don't interact/communicate enough with IBM Informix
customers/clients. If you find my contributions to this forum useful,
helpful, interesting, or merely keeping you interested in Informix,
then you could send me a short e-mail to that effect. Possibly
also stating, from which part of the world you are from ...
Thanks a lot in advance! (e-mail: martinfu (AT) de (DOT) ibm.com )
]

Regards, Martin
--
Martin Fuerderer
IBM Informix Development Munich, Germany
Information Management

Read about the Informix Warehouse Accelerator:
http://tinyurl.com/the-iwa-blog

IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
Chairman of the Supervisory Board: Martina Koederitz
Board of Management: Dirk Wittkopp
Corporate Seat: Boeblingen, Germany
Reg.-Gericht: Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 243294

informix-list-bounces (AT) iiug (DOT) org wrote on 01/30/2012 07:23:45 PM: