Oracle ORAchk | Database Health Check with Orachk

I will explain how to perform Database Health Check with Oracle ORAchk in this article. Let’s review the ORAchk – Database Health Check

ORAchk – Database Health Check

ORAchk is a tool similar to the RACchk and Exadata Exachk tools, which offer database and clusterware, patchware, patch, OS recommendations and best practices. The most up-to-date version of ORAchk is 19.2 and you can download it here with your registered user.

ORAchk ( Database Health Check )

You can use the ORAchk tool to perform a health check, as well as run the RAC Database Upgrade, and get Pre-Upgrade Problems and recommendations.

The ORAchk tool can be used in the following environments.

• Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) databases
• non-RAC databases
• MAA configuration
• Oracle Golden Gate configuration
• EBS checks
• Preinstall configuration
• Pre-upgrade configuration
• Solaris system configuration

This Tool is supported on the following systems.

• Linux x86-64* (Enterprise Linux, RedHat and SuSE 9, SuSE 10 & SuSE 11)
• Oracle Solaris SPARC (Solaris 10 and 11)
• Oracle Solaris x86-64 (Solaris 10 and 11)
• AIX **
• HPUX**

Supported database versions of the ORAchk tool are as follows.

• Oracle 10g R2
• Oracle 11g
• Oracle 12c
• Oracle 18c
• Oracle 19c

I will use for upgrade on Oracle RAC 11.2.0.3 on IBM-AIX and will learn the status of the database before upgrading and Oracle’s best practices. After downloading the ORAchk tool, upload it to server, use ORAchk tool with the following steps.

Unzip orachk.zip file like following.

[oracle@MehmetSalih ~]$ cd orachk/
[oracle@MehmetSalih ~]$ ls -all
total 11288
drwxr-xr-x 2 oracle oinstall 256 Jul 02 10:33 .
drwxr-xr-x 10 oracle oinstall 4096 Jul 02 10:33 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 oracle oinstall 5770368 Jul 02 09:53 orachk.zip


[oracle@MehmetSalih ~]$ unzip orachk.zip
Archive: orachk.zip
inflating: UserGuide.txt
inflating: rules.dat
inflating: orachk
creating: .cgrep/
................
................
................
inflating: readme.txt
inflating: collections.dat
[oracle@MehmetSalih ~]$

Contents of ORAchk are like following.

[oracle@MehmetSalih ~]$ ls -all
 total 75752
 drwxr-xr-x 3 oracle oinstall 4096 Jul 02 10:34 .
 drwxr-xr-x 10 oracle oinstall 4096 Jul 02 10:33 ..
 drwxrwxr-x 3 oracle oinstall 4096 May 31 09:37 .cgrep
 -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle oinstall 3435193 May 31 09:37 CollectionManager_App.sql
 -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle oinstall 432 May 31 09:37 UserGuide.txt
 -rw-rw-r-- 1 oracle oinstall 22951324 May 31 09:37 collections.dat
 -rwxr-xr-x 1 oracle oinstall 1604239 May 31 09:37 orachk
 -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle oinstall 5770368 Jul 02 09:53 orachk.zip
 -rwxr-xr-x 1 oracle oinstall 1604239 May 31 09:37 raccheck
 -rw-r--r-- 1 oracle oinstall 3879 May 31 09:37 readme.txt
 -rw-rw-r-- 1 oracle oinstall 3384097 May 31 09:37 rules.dat

Database Health Check with ORAchk

You can run the ORAchk tool with the following parameters for different purposes.

•  -a  When execute with the -a parameter, it performs all the checks on the database / clusterware and operating system and makes recommendations.
• -b  Only the best practices are given with the -b parameter.
• -p  With the -p parameter, patch recommendations are given for the database and the clusterware.
• -u  With the -u parameter, pre-upgrade checks are performed and recommendations are provided.
• -v  Gives ORAchk version

Lets make an example to learn ORAchk, I will use ORAchk for pre upgrade like following.

[oracle@MehmetSalih ~]$ ./orachk -u -o pre
Enter upgrade target version (valid versions are 11.2.0.3.0, 11.2.0.4.0, 12.1.0.1.0, 12.1.0.2.0):- 11.2.0.4.0
CRS stack is running and CRS_HOME is not set. Do you want to set CRS_HOME to /oracle/product/11.2.0.3/grid?[y/n][y]y
Checking ssh user equivalency settings on all nodes in cluster
Node testserver02 is configured for ssh user equivalency for oracle user
Searching for running databases . . . . .
. .
List of running databases registered in OCR
1. TESTDB
2. None of above
Select databases from list for checking best practices. For multiple databases, select 1 for All or comma separated number like 1,2 etc [1-2][1].1
. .
Checking Status of Oracle Software Stack - Clusterware, ASM, RDBMS
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oracle Stack Status
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Host Name CRS Installed ASM HOME RDBMS Installed CRS UP ASM UP RDBMS UP DB Instance Name
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
testserver01Yes N/A Yes Yes Yes Yes TESTDB1
testserver02Yes N/A Yes Yes Yes Yes TESTDB2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Installed components summary
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GI_HOME ORACLE_HOME Database Names
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/oracle/product/11.2.0.3/grid - 11.2.0.3.0 /oracle/app/product/11.2.0.3/db - 11.2.0.3.0 TESTDB
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copying plug-ins
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . .
Checking Grid Infrastructure and RDBMS upgrade readiness to version 112040

Collections and audit checks log file is
/oracle/orachk/orachk_testserver01_TESTDB_070214_104039/log/orachk.log

Checking for prompts in /home/users/oracle/.profile on testserver01 for oracle user...
Checking for prompts in /home/users/oracle/.profile on testserver02 for oracle user...

Starting to run orachk in background on testserver02
=============================================================
Node name - testserver01
=============================================================
Collecting - ASM Diskgroup Attributes
Collecting - ASM initialization parameters
Collecting - Database Parameters for TESTDB database
Collecting - Database Undocumented Parameters for TESTDB database
Collecting - Pre-upgrade File Locations for TESTDB database
Collecting - AIX Packages
Collecting - CPU Information
Collecting - Disk Information
Collecting - DiskFree Information
Collecting - DiskMount Information
Collecting - Memory Information
Collecting - Network Interface Configuration
Collecting - Network Performance
Collecting - Network Service Switch
Collecting - Network tunable parameters
Collecting - OS fixes or patches
Collecting - OS version
Collecting - Patches for Grid Infrastructure
Collecting - Patches for RDBMS Home
Collecting - System and Kernel Settings
Data collections completed. Checking best practices on testserver01.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
INFO => Prior to Upgrade Verify NO Materialized Views Being Refreshed (Automatically or Manually) for TESTDB
FAIL => Opatch version is lower than recommended in RDBMS_HOME for /oracle/app/product/11.2.0.3/db
FAIL => Opatch version is lower than recommended in GRID_HOME
INFO => Special Considerations for SCAN and HAIP of 11.2.0.2 and above Grid Infrastructure
INFO => Minimizing Planned Downtime for Upgrades and Patching
INFO => Upgrade Related References
INFO => Lifetime Support Policy and Product Certification INFO
INFO => Capture performance baseline, backup important configuration files and batch, cron, DBMS_JOBS and DBMS_SCHEDULER jobs
INFO => Known Issues Integrating pre-11gR2 Databases with Grid Infrastructure
INFO => Useful Information for Operating Oracle RAC on AIX Power Architecture
INFO => Be Aware of New Instant Client for Simplified Deployment
INFO => Oracle E-Business Suite interoperability and migration resources
INFO => Oracle Software Download Sites
WARNING => Some Users Needing Network ACLs for Oracle Utility Packages Found for TESTDB
FAIL => Auditing tables (SYS.AUD$/sys.fga_log$) row count is large enough that there could potentially be a problem during the upgrade process for TESTDB
INFO => Steps to execute rootupgrade.sh
INFO => Save "Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Control" files and data with the emdwgrd Utility before upgrading database.
INFO => Information about ASM process parameter when its not set to default value
INFO => Information about Grid Infrastructure software installation directory
WARNING => Package gpfs.base-3.3.0.11-ppc_64 is recommended but NOT installed

Copying results from testserver02 and generating report. This might take a while. Be patient.
=============================================================
Node name - testserver02
=============================================================
Collecting - AIX Packages
Collecting - CPU Information
Collecting - Disk Information
Collecting - DiskFree Information
Collecting - DiskMount Information
Collecting - Memory Information
Collecting - Network Interface Configuration
Collecting - Network Performance
Collecting - Network Service Switch
Collecting - Network tunable parameters
Collecting - OS fixes or patches
Collecting - OS version
Collecting - Patches for Grid Infrastructure
Collecting - Patches for RDBMS Home
Collecting - System and Kernel Settings
Data collections completed. Checking best practices on testserver02.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FAIL => Opatch version is lower than recommended in RDBMS_HOME for /oracle/app/product/11.2.0.3/db
FAIL => Opatch version is lower than recommended in GRID_HOME
INFO => Information about ASM process parameter when its not set to default value
WARNING => Package gpfs.base-3.3.0.11-ppc_64 is recommended but NOT installed

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLUSTERWIDE CHECKS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Detailed report (html) - /oracle/orachk/orachk_testserver01_TESTDB_070214_104039/orachk_testserver01_TESTDB_070214_104039.html
UPLOAD(if required) - /oracle/orachk/orachk_testserver01_TESTDB_070214_104039.zip
[oracle@MehmetSalih ~]$

ORAchk generated a Compressed report, download it and open,  it will be like following.

ORAchk report will give your database a System health Score and some recommendations.

Do you want to learn Oracle Database for Beginners, then Click and read the following articles.

Oracle Database Tutorials for Beginners ( Junior Oracle DBA )