Re: native Oracle-port on Linux -- what would it take?

Bjorn Borud (borud_at_guardian.no) wrote:

: | Oracle needs character devices for disk partitions.
 

: you don't really need raw devices; it's a feature you can live without
: in most cases. if you need them you simply run Oracle on some other
: platform. usually the OS will have the best idea about how the I/O

Ugh, every follow up I've seen here has missed the point. RAW device access is unbuffered. This is *essential* if you want the same disk to be accessable by two machines at the same time, which is essentially what running Oracle Parallel Server entails.

However, it should be noted:

1. OPS doesn't work very well. At work we have spoken to Oracle re implementing an OPS solution integrated with HP's MC/Serviceguard. After a few months Oracle came back and said "we give up". Oracle weren't even able to show us any UK reference sites for us to look at. We gave up and went to a log-shipping solution :-)
2. OPS is a heavy duty solution, and you wouldn't even go near it with a Linux box (or a SCO box, or an NT box) if you were halfway sane. We're talking the province of big servers here :-)

So, raw disk access isn't that much of a problem :-)

-- 
                            Stephen Harris
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