Re: UFS vs. Veritas FS

In article <33170CE8.6432_at_pacbell.com>, Frank Ober <fxober_at_pacbell.com> wrote:
>Markus wrote:
>>
>> Anyone here have any experience using Veritas FS
>> in a production environment using Oracle?
>> I like the fact that Veritas FS is tuned for performance
>> on Oracle and that it's a journaled filesystem.
>> However, since it's so new I don't know what the
>> reliability on it is, compared with the time-tested ufs.
>> I appreciate any input on this matter.
>>
>> Markus
>I run an Oracle 7.3.2.2 database on Veritas filesystems with good
>results. I have used straight concatenated disks and the performance is
>good. I also switched to RAID5 filesystems and found that you must
>enable fast writes on your disks in order to get fair performance from
>the filesystem. I would not recommend a RAID5 filesystem for the an
>Oracle Database unless you don't care too much about performance.
>Another option that would probably work better than RAID5 is RAID0 which
>is less complicated on the write side and therefore probably offers
>better write performance.

RAID 5 has poor small block write performance because it must do 2 physical reads and 2 physical writes for each single block write. If you are doing OLTP this is a performance killer. OTOH if you are doing OLAP where it is write once read many then it might be a very good match. O7.3.2 supports partitioned views which is a good way to divide up you data base so that areas of data that are still being updated could be put on RAID 0+1 (striped and mirrored) while the read mostly data can go on RAID 5. This is a good division since RAID 5 uses disk storage more efficiently.

As always YMMV.

>I see no detriment in using Veritas Filesystems,in fact there are
>several things that make using Veritas/Sun Volume Manager a good choice
>including utilities like `vxstat` which will show you how your volumes
>are performing.
>Good luck.
>--
>Frank Ober
Received on Fri Feb 28 1997 - 00:00:00 CST