Dump Types - Teradata Database

Teradata Database Administration

Product
Teradata Database
Release Number
15.10
Language
English (United States)
Last Update
2018-10-06
Product Category
Software

Dump Types

The following table describes the types of dumps on your system.

 

Crashdump Type

Description

Operating System (OS) dump

An OS dump is the unprocessed contents of memory at the time of an operating system crash. The content of the dump depends on your platform OS.

An OS dump is the result of a single node OS crash and contains the entire contents of the memory of a node. It may also be referred to as a system dump, kernel dump, or node dump. On Linux, an OS dump is called a kernel panic dump.

When an OS crash occurs, the node writes the contents of memory to a system dump area and reboots. An OS dump is typically the size of memory. An OS dump is independent of Teradata or any particular application.

Teradata Crashdump

A Teradata Crashdump, also known as a PDE dump or simply crashdump, is a result of an unrecoverable Teradata error. When Teradata crashes, PDE on each node writes selective data to its own PDE dump directory, called a raw PDE dump. How much and which of this data is actually written also depends on the type of error. After the raw PDE dump is captured, Teradata restarts, but the system does not reboot.

After Teradata restarts, the CSP utility saves the raw PDE dump of each node as rows in a crashdump table in the DBC.Crashdumps database. Depending on dump control parameters, CSP may start automatically or you can start it manually. Since Teradata is a parallel system, a full Teradata crashdump is a system-wide entity, in table format, consisting of data from each node. Specialized tools exist to examine the system-wide crashdump in table format.

Snapshot Dump

A snapshot dump occurs when a process fails on a node and the failure does not cause a Teradata Database restart.

Two utilities record process and backtrace information from snapshot dumps:

  • The Snapshot Dump facility saves the report to the DBC.Crashdumps database.
  • The dmpdiver PDE utility saves the report to /var/opt/teradata/tdtemp. Dmpdiver also sends the report to the Teradata Support Center automatically via TVI and links it with an automatically created incident. Optionally, you can include in the report the SQL responsible for generating the dump. Including the SQL may speed up problem resolution, but it is not the default. To include the SQL in the report or to change any other dmpdiver behavior, see the man page for dmpdiver.