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Title
Why the SID name has to be case sensitive in a config file? -
Description
At times source or target runs into issues due to improper case used for SID values in the config file for source and target SID respectively. This solution delves on significance of the case sensitivity of the SID in config file.
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Cause
General information.
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Resolution
The value for source and target SID in a config file is case sensitive. Shareplex uses this value to verify that the database is available. This is done for cases where there are multiple ORACLE_SIDs with the same name but different cases. Using incorrect SID for target in the route in the config file can result in redundant Post queue. Even if the mistake is corrected at some point in time in future, the remnants of the redundant queue will still remain. Another undesired side effect is that there may be two named Post queues with identical names and the only way to differentiate between them is to closely look at the value of the target SID, one of which is uppercase and the other one is lowercase as the following output of qstatus shows:
sp_ctrl (Server1:2100)> qstatus
Queues Statistics for Server1
Name: Queuename (o.SID1-o.SID2) (Post queue)
Number of messages: 414946 (Age 15644 min; Size 25 mb)
Backlog (messages): 0 (Age 0 min)Name: Queuename (o.SID1-o.sid2) (Post queue)
Number of messages: 0 (Age 0 min; Size 5 mb)
Backlog (messages): 0 (Age 0 min)
If incorrect cases were used in the config file and have resulted in unwanted Post queues on target, carry out the following corrective measures (shown for both target and source):
1. Incorrect target SID
a. For target SID, make a copy of the currently active config file, make changes to the SID case as appropriate and activate the copy. This should not take long as it only involves routing change.
b. Contact Support to clean up the remnants of the queue structures associated with the wrong SID names at a later time.
c. Make sure to re-run ora_setup on target as appropriate, in case the ora_setup was run with wrong case in the past.
2. Incorrect source SID:
If the wrong source SID case was used, then the activation will never succeed and would result in messages “Can't find home for Oracle SID…” so it will present us with ample opportunity to correct the SID value.