Re: Oracle on NT with raw devices

Don Khan wrote:
>
> Does anyone use raw devices for Oracle datafiles on NT? In the UNIX world
> this is common but I am wondering if DBAs for large Oracle on NT
> installations use raw drives. What about when NT volume sets cannot be
> allocated a drive letter because all drive letters have already been used.
> Could Oracle still use a raw volume set that does not have a drive letter.
> Reason I'm asking is because I'm working on a product that does backups of
> VLDB installations for NT and I need to figure out how Oracle NT customers
> are using storage. If you are in such an environment I would appreciate any
> info. Thanks.
 

Using Raw FS increases performance by 10 - 15% for NT, but decreases manageability by 50%. Raw partitions also require a drive letter. If you have used all the letters for drives you might want to consider merging more physical drives into a single volume and/or use RAID for fault tolerance and performance improvement.
Use of NTFS rather than RAW can save you a lot of headache in the long run and with the right combination of RAID implementation(s) (NT allows software 0, 1, and 5) and hardware 0/1 the performance and manageability are great.

Stilian Received on Mon Mar 29 1999 - 17:11:44 CST