Re: Solaris DiskSuite and Oracle: Any comments ?

Jonathan Lewis wrote:
>
> Strangely I've just come across this for the first time today,
> and it seems to be somewhat deficient when it comes to
> creating useful databases as raw files.

Based on current drivers, how much advantage is there using raw partitions over filesystem partitions? We are not in a data warehousing situation, and performance is not impacted by using filesystem partitions. It also simplifies backups.

> If someone can correct me I'll be delighted, but I understand
> that DiskSuite can only support 7 partitions per physical
> device, and a single logical raw device can only be defined
> as a collection of complete partitions.

This may be a unix thing... I've never seen more than 7 slices listed when doing a printvtoc.

>
> This seems to be somewhat limiting as I would like to create 12
> data files of 600 MB each where each file is spread across 6 discs,
> i.e. 100 MB per file per disc - however this would require 12
> partitions
> per disc.

Stripe sets are used to increase performance when the scsi or fiberchannel bus is much faster than the disk latency time. Without doing the math, it seems that striping across 6 disks is a bit excessive. What about striping across 3 disks, which would require 6 slices per disk (200Mb per slice)?

> > Is anyone using Solaris DiskSuite with Oracle ? I would like to
> have
> > your comments (positive/negative) please.
> >
> > I'm used to HARDWARE RAID on DEC machines and it worked like a
> charm
> > with Oracle, but I wonder if solaris disksuite will fit well in a
> > database environment. We don't have the money to buy hardware raid
> but
> > we need almost 7/24 uptime, so we'll use disksuite. Just wanted to
> > know if there are big problems with it...

We are currently using Sun ODS under Solaris 2.5.1 and Oracle 7.3.3 with absolutely no problems in a 24x7 environment. I would seriously suggest, however, that you skip the raid-5 because of the processor load that it creates and just go with full mirroring. Because of the way ODS handles mirroring, it puts much less load on the cpu. Received on Sun May 10 1998 - 00:27:02 CDT