DB_ULTRA_SAFE Parameter

DB_ULTRA_SAFE is a new parameter introduced in 11g. It provides an integrated mechanism to offer protection from various possible data corruptions. and provides critical high availability benefits for Oracle Database. Setting DB_ULTRA_SAFE initialization parameter will configure the appropriate data protection block checking level in the database. It will control DB_BLOCK_CHECKING, DB_BLOCK_CHECKSUM, and DB_LOST_WRITE_PROTECT.

DB_BLOCK_CHECKING controls whether or not Oracle performs block checking for database blocks.

DB_BLOCK_CHECKSUM determines whether DBWn and the direct loader will calculate a checksum (a number calculated from all the bytes stored in the block) and store it in the cache header of every data block when writing it to disk.

DB_LOST_WRITE_PROTECT enables or disables lost write detection. A data block lost write occurs when an I/O subsystem acknowledges the completion of the block write, while in fact the write did not occur in the persistent storage.

DB_ULTRA_SAFE Parameter can be set to 3 different values: OFF, DATA_ONLY and DATA_AND_INDEX. Default value is OFF.

Here are the descriptions of these values:

OFF: It will not change values of DB_BLOCK_CHECKING, DB_BLOCK_CHECKSUM and DB_LOST_WRITE_PROTECT if they are explicitly set, otherwise all of them will set to default values.

DATA_ONLY: It will set DB_BLOCK_CHECKING to medium, DB_LOST_WRITE_PROTECT to typical and DB_BLOCK_CHECKSUM to full.

DATA_AND_INDEX: It will set DB_BLOCK_CHECKING to full, DB_LOST_WRITE_PROTECT to typical, and DB_BLOCK_CHECKSUM to full.

The only difference between DATA_AND_INDEX and DATA_ONLY is DB_BLOCK_CHECKING. When DB_BLOCK_CHECKING is set to full, Oracle will do semantic checks for index blocks.