11/17/2018 the life of a log segment | SAP Blogs

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the life of a log segment

Former Member

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commit | data | Database | log | point-in-time | recover | rollback

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There has been some confusion in database-land about the terms

Log Volume
Data Volume
Log backup files
archived
written

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committed
rollback
savepoint
point-in-time recovery

People tend to address this confusion by defining the terms. But I would like to
tell you a story about the life of a data block that gets into a HANA database.
Note that my explanations are specific to the HANA database management
system running in a Dell single-node appliance but shed a light to “all” SQL
databases.

To keep it simple let’s start with a hello world example. First we create a table
world:

dellhana:~ # hdbsql -u system -p mypassword -i 42

Welcome to the SAP HANA Database interactive terminal.

Type: \h for help with commands

\q to quit

hdbsql=> create table world ( c varchar(20) )

Then we add a line:

insert into world values(‘hello’)

This is now an uncommitted (database) transaction. To get it onto disk use the
command

commit

Whenever you commit an insert, update or delete statement the data is written
to disk, into the log volume (/hana/log), in a file called a log segment. Log
segments are by default 1GB:

dellhana:~ # ls -ltr /hana/log/mnt00001/hdb00002

-rw——- 1 anaadm sapsys 1073741824 Aug 6 12:12

-rw——- 1 anaadm sapsys 1359872 Aug 6 12:14

-rw——- 1 anaadm sapsys 1073741824 Aug 8 12:07

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In this example mnt00001 is the first node in the HANA cluster (there is only
one as we are talking about single-node HANA). hdb00002 belongs to the
indexserver service (find this out with hdbstudio -> Administration Console ->
Volumes). It is August 8 and the current log segment is number 25. There you
can find our “hello” string:

dellhana:~ # strings
/hana/log/mnt00001/hdb00002/logsegment_000_00000025.dat |
grep hello

hello

Once the log segment containing the “hello” string is filled, a new log
segment will be started. The old segment will get a flag as “to be archived”.
When the next log backup is performed, the “hello” segment will be written and
the “to be archived” flag will be removed. The backup is called “archive log” in
Oracle lingo and “log backup files” in HANA lingo. When your redo log
volume runs full, the log segments that have been archived will be overwritten.
If there are no archived log segments left, logmode normal will stop
operations in order to allow corrective actions. Logmode overwrite will
overwrite log segments even if they have never been archived. Neither
logmode will overwrite data that is needed for HANA to start up.

Find out your HANA’s log mode by running the SQL command:

SELECT value FROM “SYS”.”M_INIFILE_CONTENTS” WHERE

Once a commit is done after the insert statement, other transactions can read
this new table row. Also, during the next savepoint, “hello” will be written into
the table “world” in the data volume. By default, HANA performs a savepoint
every 5 minutes. Having a short interval for the savepoints will not only reduce
data loss when the log volume fails, but also lead to faster start-up times of the
HANA database.

Why does a shorter savepoint interval reduce database startup times? Let’s
imagine you issue

insert into world values(‘hello’)

commit

Now the redo logs contain an information like “table world, first row is ‘hello’
starting 3:01pm”. When the system reboots at 3:02pm, the database will have
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to recover. The database will redo all committed transactions from before
reboot and after the last savepoint. Then it will rollback all the uncommitted
transactions from the same timeframe. The shorter that timeframe is the less
needs to be done.

The above example also shows how point-in-time recovery works. When
you keep one data backup and all log backups you will be able to tell the value
of any cell in any table of your database at a specific time. This first row in
table “world” is empty at 3:00pm. And at 3:02pm it contains “hello” (in the
above example).

And if you now imagine that you restore one backup at a secondary site and
ship the stream of log backups from the primary to the secondary site you
understand asynchroneous datacenter mirroring by transaction log
shipping.

Now our data block “hello” has been inserted, committed, written to the redo
log volume, has survived a reboot, was saved to the data volume, backed up
to the archive logs and transmitted via transaction log shipping. This story has
helped me in recent times to memorize the terms correctly and should help
you to lead an educated discussion.

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Former Member

November 6, 2017 at 3:59 pm

Nice one Former Member well explained.

thank you.

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