Re: Oracle8 for NetWare

Frank T Cianci wrote:

> Looking to install Oracle8 for Netware on a Novell server and reading up
>
> on it, it mentions that it really doesn't like disk compression and
> sub-allocation. They said Novell is aware of it and working on it. But
>
> since Novell doesn't really support Oracle, can anyone give a status on
> its progress?
>
> Just Curious
>
> Frank T Cianci

Actually, Novell works pretty closely with Oracle but that's not your question...

I've been using Oracle on Netware for about 4 years now and am familiar with Netware's block suballocation and compression issues with Oracle which came into play in Netware 4.x.

The fact is Oracle won't benefit from these features even if it does coexist with them in the future. Block suballocation is for recovering unused space in a block (i.e. block size = 64k and file is 60k, Netware can recover 4K for another file) but since Oracle does it's own block management of the datafiles (and it's own block size), this feature isn't extremely useful anyway.

Compression won't be useful either. Since the datafiles are being accessed while the database is up, the compression subsystem won't compress them anyway. Also, compression chews up CPU horsepower like crazy. When a compressed file is accessed, Netware will try to uncompress it. Even if it did work, compressing/decrompressing a large (say 500 MB) datafile would drag performance into the toilet.

My recommendation is to have at minimum two volumes. The first volume, of course, is your SYS volume that gets created when you install Netware. It's ok to have block suballocation and compression turned on here because we won't put Oracle here. Make one or more additional volumes and make sure you turn off block suballocation and compression when creating them (they are on by default). Use these additional volumes to install Oracle and store the datafiles.

Note: if you've already built your data volume or volumes with block suballocatoin and compression on, you can only turn them off by destroying the volume and recreating it.

Hope this helps.

--
mbullen_at_voyager.net Received on Sat Oct 31 1998 - 08:26:18 CST