Re: The old raw devices chestnut.

Jim Smith wrote:

> Note the cross-posting - but no flame wars please.
>
> This question was prompted by a thread on the a postgres mailing list
> during which someone (Gregory Williamson) claimed
>
> <quote>
> raw devices, at least on Solaris, are about 10 times as fast as cooked
> file systems for Informix.
> <quote>
>
> This made me think about the old arguments, and I wondered about the
> current state of thinking. Some of my knowledge will be a bit out of date.
>

[...]]

I'm still trying to figure out why ext3 filesystem under Red Hat Linux seems to be *so* much faster than ufs under Solaris... even for simple OS utilities like "find" and "cp", let alone Oracle imports and bulk inserts. Is it the journaling? Or is it the five year old hardware? ;-)

Is software RAID slower than hardware RAID, or not? (do a search on this... you'll see....).

I haven't worked with an Oracle raw device since version 7.3 seven years ago, and would never go back. The administrative overhead is just too much of a headache. We have Veritas Quick I/O licensed in our shop, but we never implemented it in production because it turns out the database I/O has never even been close to being the bottleneck for our particular application... and as stated, your applicatino may be different.

--Mark Bole Received on Mon Apr 12 2004 - 20:56:15 CDT