Oracle Connector on Solaris - memory leak?

buzzylee · Post by **buzzylee** » Tue Jul 20, 2010 5:01 am

Hi Experts,

During one of my recent DataStage assignments I observed strange behavior of Oracle Connector stage - it consumes as much of heap memory as the size of accessed data is.

I use Oracle Connector for reading data from one of Oracle 10.2.0.4 tables, all the array/transaction size properties are default (2000 records). Oracle Client version is 10.2.0.4 too, both server/client sides are Sun Solaris 10.

Is this possible that DataStage intentionally buffers all fetched rows before it finishes reading data?

It's worth to add the next operation after Oracle Connector is Filter that distributes data to two Sort stages, however according to job score each of this stages has it's own operator assigned.

Regards
Buzz

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Tue Jul 20, 2010 5:48 am

I'm not sure anyone here could actually answer that unless they've ask this same question of IBM. Unless someone else pipes up, I'd suggest you ask your official support provider about that, see if there are any known issues with the connector in your flavor/version. Then let us know what you find out.

BTW, what 8.x version are you running?

buzzylee · Post by **buzzylee** » Tue Jul 20, 2010 5:55 am

It's the newest 8.1 version with FP1, "rollup_CC_ru1_solaris_8101" and "rollup_DataStage_ru1_solaris_8101" installed.

And yes - I'm planning to open the PMR as soon as I gather DSXchange users opinion (PMR's are pain in the a..)

Cheers
Buzz

kduke · Post by **kduke** » Tue Jul 20, 2010 9:16 am

We had this issue as well. We noticed it in production and not on our test box. The Oracle clients were slightly different. I forget the numbers but lets say 10.0.4 and 10.0.5. So we installed the test client on on production and the memory leak disappeared.

buzzylee · Post by **buzzylee** » Tue Jul 20, 2010 12:21 pm

Thanks, this makes me believe it is Oracle Client issue, not DataStage itself.

I will play with different Oracle Clients (if this env still exists - it was a temporary installation for aims of proof-of-concept).

Regards
Buzz

buzzylee · Post by **buzzylee** » Wed Jul 21, 2010 3:56 pm

I managed to replicate this issue on my internal AIX server (note it's not Solaris but issue is there too!), unfortunately installing newer version of Oracle Client didn't help - no matter if it's Oracle Client 10.2.0.1 or Oracle Client 11.2.0.1 I still observe memory leak.

Is there a chance Oracle fixed this issue in 10.2.0.5 version and then introduced this 'bug' again? Somehow I don't believe it

kduke · Post by **kduke** » Wed Jul 21, 2010 4:32 pm

IBM should have a list of good clients and ones with leaks.

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Wed Jul 21, 2010 5:36 pm

buzzylee wrote:Is there a chance Oracle fixed this issue in 10.2.0.5 version and then introduced this 'bug' again? Somehow I don't believe it

Haven't worked with Oracle much yet, eh?

buzzylee · Post by **buzzylee** » Thu Jul 22, 2010 4:24 am

Actually I spent 10 years with Oracle, but mostly playing with in-database processing, with no serious usage of OCI from outside

I agree Oracle is full of bugs (as each software BTW) but this issue sounds like a really straightforward one, that should emerge really quickly in any QA test...

Anyway, thanks for your comments

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Thu Jul 22, 2010 5:43 am

I was pulling your leg, of course.

So... you've marked this as Resolved but we really didn't come to any true resolution from what I can tell. Can you let us know if you have actually resolved this, please, and what that resolution was?

buzzylee · Post by **buzzylee** » Thu Jul 22, 2010 6:44 am

Fair comment, let me first test which version of Oracle Client solves the issue.

BTW it's not easy to find the list of supported Oracle Clients on IBM pages...

buzzylee · Post by **buzzylee** » Wed Aug 11, 2010 6:40 am

Today IBM support delivered patch that fixes this issue - JR37402 for AIX system. I have tested - it works, no memory leak anymore.

I hope it's a matter of days/weeks this patch will be ported to other operating systems.

Issue resolved

buzzylee · Post by **buzzylee** » Wed Aug 11, 2010 2:49 pm

For all interested in fixing this issue on AIX platform - today IBM support officially published an APAR:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/entdocvie ... wg1JR37402

Cheers
Buzz