How to use the RAC FAN Java API

I researched an interesting new feature available with Oracle 11g R2, the so called RAC FAN API when writing the workload management chapter for the RAC book. The RAC FAN API is documented in Oracle® Database JDBC Developer’s Guide, 11g Release 2 (11.2) available online, but when it came to the initial documentation following the 11.2.0.1 release on Linux it was pretty useless. The good news is that it improved!

The RAC FAN Java API

The aim of this API is to allow a Java application to listen to FAN events by creating a subscription to the RAC nodes’ ONS processes. The application then registers a FANListener, based on the subscription, which can pick up instances of the following events:

• ServiceDownEvent
• NodeDownEvent
• LoadAdvisoryEvent

All of these are in the oracle.simplefan namespace, the javadoc reference of which you can find in the official documenation.

Getting up and running with Universal Connection Pool

Oracle’s next generation connection pooling solution, Universal Connection Pool, can be a bit tricky to set up. This is especially true when a JNDI data source is to be used-most example don’t assume such a scenario. A lot of information is out there on the net, but no one seems to have given the full picture. During the research for chapter 11 of “Pro Oracle Database 11g RAC on Linux” I learned this the hard way. Since the book has been published, a few minor changes changes have been made to the software I used at the time, and those merit an update. Please note that this article’s emphasis is to get  this example running-it is by no means meant to be secure enough for a production release! You need to harden  the setup considerably for production, but it serves well for demonstration purposes (only).

THE SETUP

I have used a four node 11.2.0.2 RAC system as the source for my data. A 2 node cluster database with service “TAFTEST” runs on nodes 1 and 2. It’s administrator-managed and the service has both nodes set aside as “preferred” nodes. The database nodes run Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.564bit with RAC 11.2.0.2. For the sake of simplicity, I used my Windows laptop to host the Tomcat instance, which is now updated to version 6.0.30. I am using apache Ant to build the application. The current stable ant build is 1.8.2. My JDK is also upgraded to the latest and greatest, version 1.6.0_23. I am using the 32bit 11.2.0.2 client package to supply me with ons.jar, ojdbc6.jar and ucp.jar.