ASM dynamic views

To manage and supervise the ASM instance and its primary components (disk and disk group) effectively, you really need to know the ASM specific dynamic views, and how to map them to extract useful information about disks, disk groups, and
so on. This section will help you to understand the use of the ASM specific dynamic views available in ASM.

There are about 19 dynamic views available, as of 11g R2, and each dynamic view provides different helpful information. All the ASM dynamic views are predefined with V$ASM_. In the following section, we are going to focus on a handful of ASM
dynamic views.

V$ASM_DISK
When an ASM instance completes the disk discovery operation by reading the disk header information, all disks (used and usable) will then list in the V$ASM_DISK view. Each individual disk has a row in the V$ASM_DISK dynamic view and contains very useful information. The PATH column specifies the disk's name and location. The HEADER_STATUS column, in most cases, contains the following three possible values:

• CANDIDATE: Indicates that the unused disks are ready for use.
• FORMER: Indicates that the disk was formerly part of a disk group and is now ready for use.
• MEMBER: Indicates that the disk is currently part of an active disk group.

Apart from the preceding values, the view also contains other useful information about the disks, such as total size, free size, physical reads, redundancy level, and so on. On the flipside, every time you run a query against this view, ASM initiates disk
discovery operations for the new disks, where it reads all disk header information. Querying against this view could be an expensive operation at times, and could impact performance.

The following list of SQL statements demonstrates some of the useful queries against the view. However, prior to running these commands, ensure you are connected to an ASM instance through sqlplus with SYSASM privilege:

SELECT path,header_status,total_mb FROM v$asm_disk WHERE header_status in ('CANDIDATE','FORMER','PROVISIONED');

The preceding command displays information about the disks that are eligible to use.

V$ASM_DISKGROUP
After a disk group is successfully created in the local ASM instance, the disk group summary is visible in the V$ASM_DISKGROUP view. Each disk group maintains a row in the view along with the important information, such as disk group number and name, total disk group size, used space, free space, redundancy type, compatibility, mount state, and so on. Every time a query is run against the view, it is likely to have a similar impact to querying the V$ASM_DISK views. The following SQL command extracts the mounted disk group's name, total disk group size, and the free space left in the group:

SELECT name,state,total_mb,usable_file_mb FROM v$asm_diskgroup;

V$ASM_OPERATION
V$ASM_OPERATION is one of the useful views that displays a row for each long running operation in the ASM instance. For example, when a disk is being dropped or attached to an existing disk group, an ASM should initiate and complete the
rebalancing operations just before releasing the subject disk. Therefore, the view will present useful details, such as the amount of work that has been completed, and show the estimated time (in minutes) required to complete the operations. This should help
you to understand how long the operation will take to complete.

V$ASM_DISK_STAT
Although the V$ASM_DISK and V$ASM_DISK_STAT views display nearly identical information, querying the V$ASM_DISK_STAT view results is a less expensive operation in comparison to the V$ASM_DISK view. On the flip side, this view doesn't display the details about new disks on the system that the ASM instance has yet to discover. As querying the view is less expensive, it is strongly recommended that you use this view in order to display the information and statistics (read/write)
about the existing disks.

V$ASM_DISKGROUP_STAT
The V$ASM_DISKGROUP_STAT view displays statistical information about the mounted disk groups in the ASM instance. Unlike the V$ASM_DISKGROUP view, a query against this view doesn't result in new disk discovery operations but is less expensive in terms of performance. Therefore, it is recommended to use this view to display existing disk group information and statistical information about the disk groups.

V$ASM_CLIENT
When the V$ASM_CLIENT view is queried in the ASM instance, it displays the information about the database instances that are using the disk groups mounted and managed by the ASM instance.