Re: Oracle Myths

"Daniel Morgan" <dmorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote in message news:3CE953FE.A7538D88_at_exesolutions.com...
> Down below in another thread TurkBear wrote: "IMHO, the size does
not matter"
> with reference to disk size.
>
> And this reminded me of another common bit of "wisdom?" with respect
to Oracle I
> thought I would throw into the mythology pot.
>
> For many years I was told that Oracle likes lots of small disks.
That the ideal
> Oracle system was 100 2GB drives rather than 10 20GB drives. I
haven't heard
> this repeated in awhile. It was only about 5 years ago I remember a
SysAdmin
> whining that he could no longer get 4GB drives and would have to
move Oracle to
> 9GB or 18GB drives.
>
> Any commments? Myth or wisdom?

Having more actuators will always be a Good Thing[tm], however, as I was recently corrected! <g>, with RAID and their monster caches (like EMC's) and that changes things a bit.

Looking at the HP TPC-C with Oracle 9i, what they did was create monster stripes with RAID 1 as the back-end. I didn't bother checking how much cache were on the arrays but my dollar would say they were stacked.

Given JBOD, I'd want drives as small as possible ... the analogy I use is:

Is it quicker to load/unload a bus via one door? Or to load the same set of people into two seater cars? <g>

--
Pablo Sanchez, High-Performance Database Engineering
mailto:pablo_at_hpdbe.com
http://www.hpdbe.com
Available for short-term and long-term contracts