Re: ORACLE on LINUX

[Thornton Prime <thornton_at_yoyoweb.com>]
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| While our projects are relatively small, a key component is
| access time and I understand that Oracle on SCO using the raw
| partitions greatly improves performance.

you are forgetting that you are comparing SCO and Linux. while Oracle may have more clues about what gives speed than SCO, I seriously doubt that they can do so much better under Linux that it is worth the hassle.

(Linux is rumored to run the SCO version of Oracle X times faster than  SCO on the same hardware, where X is some value greater than 2 and  smaller than 4. of course, I cannot verify this rumor myself,  lacking a SCO license).

| Are you saying that this is only the case for extremely large
| databases (> 1G)?

data size is not really the primary reason for having raw filesystems. most databases are easy to distribute over several real filesystems and you can get good performance by adding controllers and spindles.

a database in the area of a couple of Gig is still a medium sized database. (actually, the rowcounts, number of tables, structure of integrity constraints and relations, types of operations performed on data says a lot more than just sheer size.)

I think he primary reason for having a raw filesystem is to be able to run for example the Oracle Paralel Option. from what I've heard this option is usually so expensive in practice that most people aren't really interested in it. but some need it. for example companies with large data-warehousing databases.

| I am rather fearful of raw partitions, though, in that it may be
| difficult to back them up without using proprietary tools --
| something we don't like to do.

database backup is really an issue you _have to_ discuss with the vendor. you can get extremely nasty surprises if you try to back up a database that is running and then suddenly you have to restore.

(another risk is that someone might find the partition and go "hey, an  unused partition with no filesystem on it. cool. fsck away. I have  heard from people who actually had this happen to them -- although  the issue is rather irrelevant to this discussion ;-)

-Bjørn

-- 
 Bjørn Borud <borud_at_guardian.no>       | "The Net interprets censorship 
 <URL:http://www.pvv.unit.no/~borud/>  | as damage and routes around it."
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