[Orca-dev] count Oracle database connections

[Dmitry Berezin]

JV,

As I have mentioned it before, I have wrote a piece of code to count Oracle
Database connections before I wrote an updated workload class, so now I am
not sure which one would be more beneficial. Perhaps both have their own
uses :) (see my comments at the end).
With that, here are the answers to your questions.

> Do you count LOCAL=YES seperate from LOCAL=NO,

No, but it would be trivial to implement. Do you need this functionality?

> and does your code work with Oracle 7.3.4, 8.1.7, and 9.2?

I believe so. All it does is scan through the process table and count
oracle<SID> processes.

> Is the counter re-initialized each "day" or per-instance startup?

During every run, it counts and stores info for all different <SID>s on the
system. Once it encounters any given <SID>, it will keep track of that <SID>
until orcallator.se is restarted. This is what I meant when I wrote that it
was "dynamic" - you do not need to specify what databases to look for.
This approach, however, has its own potential problems: when the system is
rebooted, if orcallator.se runs through its first data gathering cycle
before all of the databases are running (that is, within first ten minutes
of the startup of orcallator.se), then you will end up with multiple data
files for that day (since the header information will change with the
addition of new oracle instances), which might not be a problem, especially,
if you have applied a "volatile" data patch to orca.

I see the value of this patch in the environments with the large number of
servers and database instances, since it does not require custom
configuration changes on every client.
On the other hand, if you would rather manually specify which databases to
monitor, you could use the workload patch. I'm actually thinking about
adding another configuration option to it to only count the number of
processes. 

> I can provide test cases with my hardware if you need that, I have about
> 85 Oracle dbs.

Sure, what version of orcallator.se are you running? I will post the diff
for that version, so that you could test it in your environment.

  -Dmitry.