Re: RAIDs and Oracle Tablespace layout

There are a slew of good whitepapers on the Sun site concerning RAID. I think a Brian Wong paper called something like 'What does RAID mean to me' is out there and it explains the fundamentals of RAID in English.

You are not automatically spared from caring about the layout of tables/index and the like because your disk subsystem is in a RAID configuration. You do however create additional flexibility in configuration allowing you to influence the logical volume's behavior and performance easier. Sun supports the software RAID products 'Veritas Volume Manage'r and 'Solstice Disksuite'. They also have hardware RAID. Find out which you have. Depending on which one you have, you can do different things. You can balance I/O across available controllers by moving busy tables. Depending on the volume manager, you can change read/write policy to suit as well as write size. You can affect a great deal by planning where things reside on a RAID subsystem and what RAID level you use.
Beyond the scope of this discussion is the subject of determining what type of database you will be using, ie., OLTP, DSS, datawarehouse and if you are doing mostly sequential or random I/O as a prerequisite to designing the proper underlying RAID solution to suit. Another question needed to decide on the RAID level is based on the required availability of the database.

Regards,

Miki Sarkozi Received on Wed Feb 21 2001 - 02:41:58 CST