Re: Oracle and Raw Devices - Any Opinions For And Against ?

I currently manage a database, 300GB which uses raw partitions for datafiles and log files. From a data manipulation standpoint, I would much rather have my datafiles on UFS (or XFS), we do bulk loading with batch updates every month approx. 1-2 million rows of inserts, update, deletes. It would be much faster for us to apply these updates outside of oracle, especially as far as error checking is concerned. (I am not the one who performs the updates, so I guess this is hear-say unless someone will back me up!)

What I do know...Backups are SLOW!!! The only utility for backup ( other than 3rd party software) is the dd command. DD is slow even with the DLT drives, and can only write to a local device. Datafiles cannot span tapes and recovery is a pain. Unless you know the specific block of the datafile you must recover all raw partitions on a specific tape.

-- 
JP Soria
Jr. Oracle7 DBA
Email: jpsoria_at_saxe.com
"Oracle guru-am not"