Recently I’ve been working with SQL Server and while it’s not all bad, sometimes it does helps to highlight some of the neat features available in Oracle.  One of these is IMPLICIT cursors, which I shall demonstrate.

First I’ll show how to populate some data in a table and then loop over it in TSQL (SQL Server’s equivalent of PL/SQL):

1> CREATE TABLE demo (col1 TINYINT, col2 TINYINT, col3 TINYINT);
2> GO

1> INSERT INTO demo (col1, col2, col3)
2>           VALUES (11,   12,   13),
3>                  (21,   22,   23),
4>                  (31,   32,   33);
5> GO
(3 rows affected)

1>  DECLARE @col1 tinyint, @col2 tinyint, @col3 tinyint;
2>  DECLARE explicit_cursor CURSOR LOCAL FAST_FORWARD FOR
3>     SELECT col1, col2, col3 FROM dbo.demo;
4>
5>  OPEN explicit_cursor;
6>  FETCH NEXT FROM explicit_cursor INTO @col1, @col2, @col3;
7>
8>  WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0
9>  BEGIN
10>    PRINT CONCAT(@col1, ':', @col2, ':', @col3);
11>    FETCH NEXT FROM explicit_cursor INTO @col1, @col2, @col3;
12> END
13>
14> CLOSE explicit_cursor;
15> DEALLOCATE explicit_cursor;
16>
17> GO
11:12:13
21:22:23
31:32:33

By the way, note the neat way it’s possible to insert 3 records with a single INSERT statement. I didn’t say there weren’t some things that SQL Server does a little better 🙂

Next check out the equivalent SQL statements and PL/SQL code in the Oracle Database. Note my Oracle demos are running on an Autonomous Transaction Processing Database in Oracle Cloud although should work in all versions including Oracle XE, the free to use database.

SQL> CREATE TABLE demo (col1 NUMBER, col2 NUMBER, col3 NUMBER);
Table DEMO created.

SQL> INSERT INTO demo (col1, col2, col3) VALUES (11, 12, 13);
1 row inserted.

SQL> INSERT INTO demo (col1, col2, col3) VALUES (21, 22, 23);
1 row inserted.

SQL> INSERT INTO demo (col1, col2, col3) VALUES (31, 32, 33);
1 row inserted.

SQL> COMMIT;
Commit complete.

SQL> SET SERVEROUTPUT ON SIZE UNLIMITED;
SQL>
SQL> DECLARE
  2      CURSOR explicit_cursor IS
  3         SELECT col1, col2, col3 FROM demo;
  4      explicit_record explicit_cursor%ROWTYPE;
  5  BEGIN
  6      OPEN explicit_cursor;
  7      LOOP
  8          FETCH explicit_cursor INTO explicit_record;
  9          EXIT WHEN explicit_cursor%NOTFOUND;
 10          sys.dbms_output.put_line(explicit_record.col1 || ':' ||
 11                                   explicit_record.col2 || ':' ||
 12                                   explicit_record.col3          );
 13      END LOOP;
 14      CLOSE explicit_cursor;
 15  END;
 16  /

11:12:13
21:22:23
31:32:33

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Already I prefer a few things about the Oracle solution.  The ability to use a cursor %ROWTYPE rather than having to define and use variables for individual columns, the fact there is only one fetch command required and the use of the %NOTFOUND cursor attribute rather than the somewhat arbitrary @@FETCHSTATUS == 0 check.

However Oracle offers an even better method, namely an implicit cursor.

SQL> BEGIN
  2      FOR implicit_record IN (SELECT col1, col2, col3 FROM demo)
  3      LOOP
  4          sys.dbms_output.put_line(implicit_record.col1 || ':' ||  
  5                                   implicit_record.col2 || ':' ||  
  6                                   implicit_record.col3          );
  7      END LOOP;
  8  END;
  9  /

11:12:13
21:22:23
31:32:33

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed

A few things to note.  We’re down from 15 to 8 lines of code which makes this easier to write, and just as importantly with less chance of bugs.  No need to worry about defining rowtypes, or opening or closing cursors, Oracle just does the right thing under the covers including tidying up in case exceptions are thrown.

I’ve been playing around with researching ORDS over the summer particularly trying to optimize performance on Tomcat. Trying something a little different I’ve created a Vagrant box that should allow anybody interested to verify my findings, find mistakes I’ve made or identify performance optimizations I’ve missed.

If you’re new to Vagrant, Tim Hall provides a good introduction for the Oracle DBA.

You can clone or download the Vagrant box from my github page hopefully the instructions should be clear, you need to download Oracle 18cXE and ORDS releases and put into the software directory.  I’ve allocated 6GB RAM and 4 CPUs to the virtual machine, you may need to adjust these values depending on your test machine resources.  Doing “vagrant up” should automatically configure the database, and configure ORDS running in Tomcat and with some reverse proxies.  It will also generate a self-signed certificate and configure the SSL handling in both Tomcat and the reverse proxies.  Most of the database and ORDS configuration scripts were taken from the Oracle Vagrant boxes or Tim’s Vagrant boxes.

The bench-marking tool I am using is Siege.  There are many alternatives available but I chose Siege for a few reasons.  Firstly it is Free and Open Source software.  Secondly it is easy to configure, simply populate a file, urls.txt, with the URLs to hit and then run the executable with suitable parameters.  Finally it is lightweight, being written in C, whereas many other similar tools are written in Java, as I am running the bench-marking tool on the same virtual machine that hosts the software components I’m trying to measure this is important.

Once the vagrant machine is up, you can connect to it via “vagrant ssh” and then type “ords-demo” to run the entire test-suite. I’ll go through the individual tests in the following blog posts and share my findings.

Preparing for my talk at the HK Open Source Conference I wanted to confirm some of the things I had read about these plugins, mostly from Matthias Crauwels excellent article on the subject.

My lab environment consists of Windows 2016 Domain controller and client machines, with MySQL 8 running on Oracle Linux 7.

First I configure the database to use the server-side plugin, configure the plugin to point to the domain controller, and create a database user associated via the plugin with my Windows account.

mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN authentication_ldap_simple SONAME 'authentication_ldap_simple.so';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.05 sec)

mysql> SET GLOBAL authentication_ldap_simple_server_host='win-dc.windows.domain';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> CREATE USER 'patrick'@'%'
    ->        IDENTIFIED WITH authentication_ldap_simple
    ->        BY 'CN=patrick,CN=Users,DC=WINDOWS,DC=DOMAIN';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.08 sec)

Next I successfully connect from my Windows client to this database account passing in my Windows credentials.

[patrick@WIN-CLIENT] C:\> mysql --host=lnx-mysql8.windows.domain `
>>                              --user=patrick                   `
>>                              --password=Password123           `
>>                              --enable-cleartext-plugin
mysql: [Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 63
Server version: 8.0.13-commercial MySQL Enterprise Server - Commercial

Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql>

Checking the network packets between the Windows client and database server, observe that (almost all) the traffic is encrypted with a self-signed certificate.

[root@lnx-mysql8 ~]# tcpflow -c port 3306
tcpflow: listening on enp0s3
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49801: U
<UdYcaching_sha2_passwordLR%
192.168.002.002.49801-192.168.002.004.03306:
192.168.002.002.49801-192.168.002.004.03306: ANi<l[}y~yn+,/0#'$(g@kj
239-.<>%=h&/05612?)i*17
U


0H1212013500Z0@1>0<U5MySQL_Server_8.0.13_Auto_Generated_Server_Certificate0"0
DH<@_Cn%VR9A)[QLMVjAYe1Kju2\)Wk7SqOG02Xl;>n)i&gjV:/,J^f("qBDH8kW:lKQ+B 3;K^!.$5BxJ=0XWD,00U00
^uBey@/e;m4sQ
lJDiU{?s;[72FeLkS
p{WFXdr**yLPp'ij_(z`E"{Lxu|1DX$Jp`w;Ti<}BlLA@?
0H1212013500Z0<1:08U1MySQL_Server_8.0.13_Auto_Generated_CA_Certificate0"0 2 |s?jupq&GG]5`-2$1'$,AT"`OA/^d((~:n0Z'~O?$+az]y(De"5Klwiv(B"ST~rE0'7qIWZc%R$D8v9MzF|\blAK00U00 9()~I?-Nq(#LRACVU>eOWB["IOm$\]fvNa7W\m?
dYt^dT)-Y&UWUBlnmOA}?%YW>D
C*<*f,OD^^G"
'#-F*/=@=]mnDRVQ,RG(a|la^!fH)5"{EbynK4{q:CiV%#(f_hr_/-X~S/:
(@C{jB&{%ddU-F0fG/2t_aPUw\A%&+:{K"t(+}Q~+|#XxJNS\XhDz);=79.o{Q<sp??D^0\v:6[a|$ooBZ(K0Zt}. WjeoWOi4AE]YkQXUH0E2;'US-/Dw0[4@&3]]/c`GCEEzmU@oG2{%Z&`0!A}]A[.:m 7q@w]Rv3-nKZP$N''}yjKssvFvc:O$'rU)f(=@,Wup,>b+xF[Lv6;
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49801: ,
{xsGdN>
XEUyH`?T'd7fI JwN%:eq2#;y'Nh(hm}c$dG'zs
zT@(W$]#Wm4nw2t7(`X-5lK'SXwk0qS3
192.168.002.002.49801-192.168.002.004.03306: =@,Wa{q%)}aH9;.%~k$hoKI+a8\B}@NR@Dp`JFDwK\(1%9 %5XqO f:Pgmvi|>N^&=k/~egl]i@s;p
\8&?4AKg>r63E
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49801: H`XmX2:@~Oq)BY-|<`GS6ew 192.168.002.002.49801-192.168.002.004.03306: 0=@,W.la:QC0,%>G~L6
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49801: #`X-$~v4_L3
|s
192.168.002.002.49801-192.168.002.004.03306: ==@,W.BFu?6'F6|P)EC]?%n)ww
nSHK*+@6FS(9l|Y2>apy;-192.168.002.002.49801: |`X,

Note however it is possible to disable this encryption with the –ssl-mode=disabled flag.

[patrick@WIN-CLIENT] C:\> mysql --host=lnx-mysql8.windows.domain `
>>                              --user=patrick                   `
>>                              --password=Password123           `
>>                              --enable-cleartext-plugin        `
>>                              --ssl-mode=disabled
mysql: [Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 64
Server version: 8.0.13-commercial MySQL Enterprise Server - Commercial

Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql>

Observe that the password is now transmitted unencrypted during authentication

[root@lnx-mysql8 ~]# tcpflow -c port 3306
tcpflow: listening on enp0s3
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49899: U
8.0.13-commercialAi95M2)P3(f}3caching_sha2_password
192.168.002.002.49899-192.168.002.004.03306: patrick lv
J5T{W0J-rcaching_sha2_passwordq_pid172program_namemysql_client_namelibmysql_thread2640_client_version8.0.13_osWin64_platformx86_64
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49899: mysql_clear_password
192.168.002.002.49899-192.168.002.004.03306: Password123
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49899:
192.168.002.002.49899-192.168.002.004.03306: !select @@version_comment limit 1
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49899: 'def@@version_comment$%$MySQL Enterprise Server - Commercial

Such connections can be prevented with the require_secure_transport=ON variable

mysql> SET GLOBAL require_secure_transport=ON;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

In this case connections which disable encryption will be rejected

[patrick@WIN-CLIENT] C:\> mysql --host=lnx-mysql8.windows.domain `
>>                              --user=patrick                   `
>>                              --password=Password123           `
>>                              --enable-cleartext-plugin        `
>>                              --ssl-mode=disabled
mysql: [Warning] Using a password on the command line interface can be insecure.
ERROR 3159 (HY000): Connections using insecure transport are prohibited while --require_secure_transport=ON.
[patrick@WIN-CLIENT] C:\>

Unfortunately even though the connection is rejected, the password is still transmitted unencrypted during authentication process

[root@lnx-mysql8 ~]# tcpflow -c port 3306
tcpflow: listening on enp0s3
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49867: U
8.0.13-commercial@=l?K/sbq!Qa&sG{{Bcaching_sha2_password
192.168.002.002.49867-192.168.002.004.03306: patrick Au'"?..`%85n]~caching_sha2_passwordr_pid3416program_namemysql_client_namelibmysql_thread4992_client_version8.0.13_osWin64_platformx86_64
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49867: mysql_clear_password
192.168.002.002.49867-192.168.002.004.03306: Password123
192.168.002.004.03306-192.168.002.002.49867: aW#HY000Connections using insecure transport are prohibited while --require_secure_transport=ON.

However if we re-run the original connection attempt (with encrypted traffic between database client and server)  capturing the network traffic between database and domain controller, we can see password is transferred unencyrpted as this point

[root@lnx-mysql8 .passwords]# tcpflow -c port 389
tcpflow: listening on enp0s3
192.168.002.004.43068-192.168.002.001.00389: 0PcK

NtVer0mainWINDOWS.DOMAIN
netlogon
192.168.002.001.00389-192.168.002.004.43070: 0d00znetlogon1jhl)X0K4fWINDOWSDOMAINWIN-DCWINDOWSWIN-DCDefault-First-Site-NameE0e

192.168.002.004.43070-192.168.002.001.00389: 0B
192.168.002.004.42990-192.168.002.001.00389: 0?`:(CN=patrick,CN=Users,DC=WINDOWS,DC=DOMAINPassword123
192.168.002.001.00389-192.168.002.004.42990: 0a

The documentation alludes to some of the restrictions, although to my mind it seems to focus on the encryption between database client and server, but not between database server and Domain Controller (unless I’ve missed something).

The server-side authentication_ldap_simple plugin performs simple LDAP authentication. For connections by accounts that use this plugin, client programs use the client-side mysql_clear_password plugin, which sends the password to the server in clear text. No password hashing or encryption is used, so a secure connection between the MySQL client and server is recommended to prevent password exposure.

Based on the above observations, as I was expecting, this plugin combination is not really suitable for implementation for any environment which takes security seriously.

If that wasn’t enough reason to avoid the plugin, during the course of my investigation I discovered some other surprising behavior.  Based on discussion with Oracle support this should be resolved in the next release of SQL Server, so I’ll wait till that is released before sharing.

Recently some of our developers have moved forwards with fixing some code that has been using literals, instead of bind variables.  A complication is that they are using lists of values, so the SQL they were generating was of format

WHERE COL1 IN (1,2,3,4)

They resolved this by using an array in Java and construct similar to the following:

WHERE COL1 IN (SELECT * FROM TABLE(?))

However when moving to the new method performance degraded, they were getting full table scans where previously they were getting index access.
Initially I thought we could resolve this by using a cardinality hint on the TABLE select ie:

WHERE COL1 IN (SELECT /*+CARDINALITY(t 1) */ * FROM TABLE(?) t)

However this didn’t help much. I’ve managed to reproduce the problem to the testcase below (running on 18c):

SQL> CREATE TABLE t1
  2      AS
  3          SELECT
  4              ROWNUM id,
  5              rpad('x', 100) padding
  6          FROM
  7              dual
  8          CONNECT BY
  9              level  <= 4000; -- comment to avoid WordPress format issue  

Table T1 created.

SQL> create index t1_i1 on t1(id);

Index T1_I1 created.

SQL> exec dbms_stats.gather_table_stats(null, 't1');

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

SQL> create or replace type n_t as table of number;
  2  /

Type N_T compiled

SQL> SELECT /*+ gather_plan_statistics */  NULL
  2      FROM
  3        (SELECT DISTINCT a.id
  4              FROM t1   a)
  5      WHERE
  6          id IN (1)
  7  /
NULL



SQL> select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format=>'allstats last'));
PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
SQL_ID  a18bwsyqx37gs, child number 0
-------------------------------------
SELECT /*+ gather_plan_statistics */  NULL     FROM       (SELECT
DISTINCT a.id             FROM t1   a)     WHERE         id IN (1)

Plan hash value: 405044659

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation           | Name  | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT    |       |      1 |        |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |
|   1 |  VIEW               |       |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |
|   2 |   SORT UNIQUE NOSORT|       |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |
|*  3 |    INDEX RANGE SCAN | T1_I1 |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       2 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   3 - access("A"."ID"=1)



21 rows selected.

SQL> SELECT /*+ gather_plan_statistics */  NULL
  2      FROM
  3        (SELECT DISTINCT a.id
  4              FROM t1   a)
  5      WHERE
  6          id IN (SELECT /*+cardinality(nt 1) */ column_value FROM TABLE ( n_t(1) ) nt)
  7  /
NULL



SQL> select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor(format=>'allstats last'));
PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
SQL_ID  cwcsdhm543ph2, child number 0
-------------------------------------
SELECT /*+ gather_plan_statistics */  NULL     FROM       (SELECT
DISTINCT a.id             FROM t1   a)     WHERE         id IN (SELECT
/*+cardinality(nt 1) */ column_value FROM TABLE ( n_t(1) ) nt)

Plan hash value: 1445712880

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                               | Name    | Starts | E-Rows | A-Rows |   A-Time   | Buffers |  OMem |  1Mem | Used-Mem |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT                        |         |      1 |        |      1 |00:00:00.01 |      64 |       |       |          |
|*  1 |  HASH JOIN RIGHT SEMI                   |         |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |      64 |  2546K|  2546K|  303K (0)|
|   2 |   JOIN FILTER CREATE                    | :BF0000 |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |       |       |          |
|   3 |    COLLECTION ITERATOR CONSTRUCTOR FETCH|         |      1 |      1 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |       0 |       |       |          |
|   4 |   VIEW                                  |         |      1 |   4000 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |      64 |       |       |          |
|   5 |    HASH UNIQUE                          |         |      1 |   4000 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |      64 |  2294K|  2294K|  514K (0)|
|   6 |     JOIN FILTER USE                     | :BF0000 |      1 |   4000 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |      64 |       |       |          |
|*  7 |      TABLE ACCESS FULL                  | T1      |      1 |   4000 |      1 |00:00:00.01 |      64 |       |       |          |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   1 - access("ID"=VALUE(KOKBF$))

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
   7 - filter(SYS_OP_BLOOM_FILTER(:BF0000,"A"."ID"))



27 rows selected.

SQL>

Fundmentally I think the problem is the optimzer is unable to push the TABLE function into the inner select.
For the moment we’re having to revert to a hybrid solution where they generate SQL such as the following:

WHERE COL1 IN (?,?,?,?)

Each value has to be bound seperately. It’s not ideal as shared pool is somewhat full of each variation depending on how many values there are.  Also they are having to do a soft parse of the cursor each time, rather than parsing once and re-using.

However other than getting the developers to rewrite all their queries I don’t see any better solution at the moment.

After implementing a recent change, and I pulled of a quick AWR report to compare performance.  At first glance I was impressed by significant improvement in “log file parallel write” event, which had halved from 2 millisecond to 1 millisecond, but something about the numbers didn’t quite look right.

Before:

After:

Let’s calculate the average wait times ourselves:
Before:  2,346s/1,482,747=0.00158219844s=1.58 ms.
After:  2,658s/1,785,172=0.00148893215s=1.49 ms.

So AWR rounds to the nearest millisecond, and this has turned an actual 6% (=(1.58-1.49)/1.58*100)  improvement into a 100% improvement.

Note that in Oracle 12.2 AWR handles this much better by reporting wait events in microseconds, one more reason to upgrade!

Update (2018-07-28) Lukas Eder highlighted via twitter that my comparison was invalid dues to some PL/SQL optimizations. I have updated the testcase, there is still significant improvement, just not as much as my previous test

Recently I’ve been noticing a lot of frequently called PL/SQL code that has structure similar to the following:

SELECT TO_CHAR(l_date, 'YYYY-MM-DD') INTO l_string FROM DUAL;

I really don’t know how people got into the habit of doing things this way, isn’t the following much simpler?

l_string := TO_CHAR(l_date, 'YYYY-MM-DD');

Does it really matter? Isn’t it just a coding preference? Let’s benchmark to see the difference:

SQL> declare
  2      l_string VARCHAR2(10);
  3      l_len NUMBER := 0;
  4      l_date DATE := SYSDATE;
  5  begin
  6
  7      for loopy in 1..1000000
  8      loop
  9          SELECT TO_CHAR(SYSDATE, 'YYYY-MM-DD') into l_string FROM DUAL;
 10          l_len := l_len + LENGTH(l_string);
 11      end loop;
 12      dbms_output.put_line(l_len);
 13  end;
 14  /

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Elapsed: 00:00:17.171
SQL>

We executed the statement one million times in just over 17 seconds. Not too shabby. However let’s try the other way:

SQL> declare
  2      l_string VARCHAR2(10);
  3      l_len NUMBER := 0;
  4  begin
  5      for loopy in 1..1000000
  6      loop
  7          l_string := TO_CHAR(SYSDATE, 'YYYY-MM-DD');
  8          l_len := l_len + LENGTH(l_string);
  9      end loop;
 10      dbms_output.put_line(l_len);
 11  end;
 12  /

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Elapsed: 00:00:02.082

Same amount of work, eight times faster. Why? Probably something to do with context switches between PL/SQL and SQL Engines, but don’t stress too much about that, just look at the figures.

Oracle Database CPU cycles are expensive, don’t waste them doing things inefficiently. Please stop abusing the DUAL table.

We’ve just upgraded the database containing our recovery catalog to 12.2. Although rman operations seemed to be completing OK, we noticed the following slightly worrying error message in the alert log:

PDB(3):WARNING: too many parse errors, count=44106 SQL hash=0x2473a808
PDB(3):PARSE ERROR: ospid=398064, error=6550 for statement:
2018-07-22T17:06:22.313262+08:00
PDB(3):BEGIN :owner := dbms_rai_owner; END;
PDB(3):Additional information: hd=0x26ee29a560 phd=0x26ee122418 flg=0x101476 cisid=343 sid=343 ciuid=343 uid=343
2018-07-22T17:06:22.313360+08:00
PDB(3):----- PL/SQL Call Stack -----
  object      line  object
  handle    number  name
0x26afed3ed8        36  package body RCAT.DBMS_RCVVPC.IS_RA
0x26afed3ed8         8  package body RCAT.DBMS_RCVVPC.__pkg_init
0x240a892a20         1  anonymous block
0x23cb60d9d0         4  anonymous block

I checked the source of the package DBMS_RCVPC in the recovery catalog (it is unwrapped PL/SQL):

FUNCTION is_ra
  RETURN BOOLEAN
  IS
    l_owner all_users.username%TYPE;
  BEGIN
    EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'BEGIN :owner := dbms_rai_owner; END;'
      USING OUT l_owner;
    RETURN (l_owner IS NOT NULL);
  EXCEPTION
    WHEN OTHERS
    THEN RETURN FALSE;
  END is_ra;

I cannot find any object named dbms_rai_owner in the database.
It seems the package is designed to fail with a parse error and that will be caught by the “WHEN OTHERS” handler and return false, and that is what had been happening when this database was at version  12.1.
What has changed is that Oracle now writes details about such parse errors (see Oracle support document 2320935.1 for more details).

Ideally the Oracle developers need to re-write the package logic so it doesn’t rely on throwing parsing exceptions, but until then, I think this message in the alert log can be safely ignored.

Update (2018-07-27): Bug 28223871 – RMAN12C.DBMS_RCVVPC.IS_RA WARNING: TOO MANY PARSE ERRORS, COUNT=4519

Symptom can be fixed by disabling VPD on recovery catalog using dbmsrmanvpc.sql -novpd. Obviously weigh up the pros and cons of this before proceeding.