INTERIM_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Bob Purvy/Oracle and David Brower/INGRES Minutes of the Relational Database Management Systems MIB Working Group (RDBMSMIB) Agenda o Discuss Mike Hartstein's proposal for an ``analyst's briefing'' in April, when the group's work has been completed. o Introductions and chairman's review of what has gone on in the group lately (Microsoft invitation, IETF sessions, etc.). o Review latest Internet-Drafts. The goal is to settle all outstanding issues with the MIB as it is now, before addressing new functionality. While it is not definate that the group can do it at this meeting, there is some chance of it. Outstanding Issues o Use of Network Services MIB. What are the implications? This may take awhile! o rdbmsSrvInfoUpTime and other time-related issues. When do the statistics have to get reset? o Marc Sinykin's issues (message of 20 February): rdbmsSrvInfoDiskOutOfSpaces, etc. General question of the proper handling of variables which cannot be gotten by the database (sub)agent. o Whatever else people come up with. DEC is sending someone this time, so there may be some new issues from them, or from other new attendees. New Issues o Prioritize the new features that have been proposed, or that are proposed at the meeting. Which are the most critical to get in? The goal is just to touch lightly on the issues, and make sure that someone is tasked with coming up with a concrete proposal on the group's top priorities. Discussion o Some members wanted more discussion of the ``analyst's briefing'' proposal; this will be carried out via e-mail. o It had appeared earlier that very few members were planning on attending the Seattle IETF, but it looks like quite a few are now registering or planning to, so we should have a good turnout. o The question was brought up about the difficulty of computing ``space used''; several vendors find this extremely costly to get. It was pointed out that your implementation can cache the result and refuse to compute it more often than you find acceptable. We also decided to insert the word ``estimated'' in the description for that variable. o The Network Services MIB (RFC 1565) was discussed at length. No one much liked the implementation difficulties; using a subagent technology, it implies that every network service on the host must choose a unique index via some method which is outside the SNMP standard. It was remarked that some master agents are capable of accepting registrations for a particular row of a conceptual table, and/or assigning a unique index themselves, while others cannot do either. Various alternatives were debated. Ultimately we decided that it was ``the right thing to do,'' and furthermore, not supporting RFC 1565 would likely cause problems getting our standard approved. There will be difficulties for some period of time as hardware vendors and SNMP agent providers come up to speed with the new requirements of application monitoring, but we really do not see a good alternative to doing this. Dave Brower had already circulated a draft MIB with RFC 1565 incorporated; this will be refined on the basis of what was decided, and reissued as an Internet-Draft. o The question arose on how to denote ``unlimited'' in the MaxSessions variable. Some standards groups have used zero in cases like this, and others have used -1. We choose zero. o The questions about counters and ``up time'' were debated. Marshall explained the SNMP philosophy of polling and counters (basically, only the change in a counter's value is to be considered significant). (This discussion assumes a master agent/subagent architecture, where the same subagent implements its rows in the Network Services MIB and in the RDBMS MIB.) `applUptime' will assume a new value any time the subagent/RDBMS changes state. This is the signal to the management application that a sampling discontinuity may have taken place. Therefore, the drill is when the subagent comes up, it gets the value of sysUptime, and makes that the applUptime. If the value of sysUptime is unavailable, it uses zero. o rdbmsRelActiveTime - remove the word `first.' o Stan Wong's message was reviewed. We agreed to change the wording of ``vendor'' to allow for multiple products from the same vendor (``vendor/product'' or some other such choice of the editor) We accepted Stan's proposal to remove rdbmsDbInfoCreateTime from the MIB, since it does not add much to manageability. ``Time of last backup'' is to be added to the wish list. o A paragraph should be added to the overview explaining that this MIB is not intended to be sufficient in and of itself for performance tuning an RDBMS, and that the vendor's private MIB, if it exists, will be a more reliable guide. o The wording on DbInfoTable was debated at some length. Oracle felt it was important that the wording not preclude a row being present if a database is not active. The upshot is that Marc Sinykin, Dave Brower, Marshall Rose, and Bob Purvy will confer electronically and propose a wording. o A ``contact person'' variable is to be added to the Server table, analogous to rdbmsDbContact. o For ``disk reads'' and ``disk writes,'' the word ``physical'' is to be removed. We cannot know that a read or write issued to the operating system actually resulted in a physical read or write. (Note that this variable does not count reads or writes which may be satisfied out of the vendor's own cache; this is still to count only reads or writes issued to the operating system, or disk subsystem if no OS is being used.) o Stan Wong will try to find a definition of ``database'' acceptable to all. We wish him luck in this endeavor. o There is some sentiment to remove rdbmsSrvInfoUncommittedTransactions from the MIB. No consensus was reached yet, but for now a comment will be added that this variable is controversial. Attendees David Brower daveb@ingres.com David Campbell campbell@nova.enet.dec.com Anthony Daniel anthony@informix.com Craig De Noce craigd@sybase.co Howard Dernehl howard@ingres.com Bill Kehoe kehoe@sybase.com Brian Promes bpromes@novell.com Robert Purvy bpurvy@us.oracle.com Marshall T. Rose mrose.iesg@dbc.mtview.ca.us Marc Sinykin msinykin@us.oracle.com Jay Smith jaysmith@us.oracle.com Stan Wong swong@vnet.ibm.com