Re: Oracle 9i/Solaris 8/NFS & >4GB datafiles

DerUbergeek doodled thusly:

>The relevance is to describe the system. And yes, I would be surprised
>if largefiles weren't supported in the 32bit kernel version of the same
>O/S. Largefiles were supported prior to Solaris going fully 64 bit. And,
>according to my tests via mkfile, they're also supported in my specific
>configuration.

I believe you. However, I rememember not even one year ago having this same discussion with an IBM guy who was trying to create a 60Gb flat datafile to be shared by NFS and he couldn't get it going. On a partitioned Sun E10K. Eventually, he got it. We were using the latest, whitest and brightest from Sun at the time. But he had to apply all sorts of patches to Solaris and NFS to get it to work. Maybe that would be also your case?

>
>Again, why? And yes, I'm fully aware of what 2^32-1 is. The bitsize
>support of the native O/S should have no impact on the size of files
>supported (aside from performance issues).

Dunno, ask ORACLE. I'm not paid by them, they can talk for themselves. ;-)

>Now, obviously, the coders
>could get lazy and decide to only support the sizes that allow for easy
>coding (and potentially higher performance), but I don't believe that
>that's an issue with Solaris 8. Certainly it was with <5.6 even running
>on 64 bit UltraSparc.

I've got a feeling that because the files start off being <4Gb, 9i would be using 32-bit calls on them. When they auto-extend to >4Gb, 9i fails to close them and re-open with 64-bit calls. They wouldn't be using 64-bit calls exclusively, I think. Have you tried to start 9i off with the files *already* larger than 4Gb? Then let them extend even larger if needed? That would be an equivalent of your test with UNIX commands.
How long has Sol8 been out, BTW?

>So perhaps my real question could be simplified to:
>
>What deficiencies in NFS on Solaris 8 could cause files to truncate at
>4GB using Oracle 9i? Or is this an issue of Oracle not using the
>appropriate file system calls? From what I've read, I believe they were
>supposed to have fixed all of this somewhere in the early Oracle8 versions.

Could be any of the two. My gut feel is that Oracle not recommending the use of NFS for data files would put a very low priority on their coders to support VLF with NFS.

That said, anything is possible. Solaris has a history of requiring lots of patches, so maybe therein lies the problem.

Cheers
Nuno Souto
nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam Received on Sat Dec 08 2001 - 21:28:47 CST