Re: Synchronous writes & TEMP

"VC" <boston103_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<MqIoc.39444$xw3.2544076_at_attbi_s04>...
> Does anybody know why Oracle uses synchronous writes while writing to the
> temporary tablespace ? Presumably we do not care about data loss in this
> case.
>
> Your thouhts are much appreciated.
>
> VC

Probably I was being a little imprecise judging by lack of feedback.

What I am asking here is why Oracle insists on executing synchronous write operations whilst writing to the TEMP tablespace. A synchronous write means such operation that does not return control to the caller until the data is presumed to be safely on the disk. By contrast, a non-synchronous write (the 'default') operation returns control as soon as the data is transferred to the filesystem cache. The rationale for executing synchronous writes against the data files and redo logs is obvious.

I believe (but I may be wrong since I checked only Solaris and Linux) that writes to TEMP are synchronous regardless of the OS or Oracle version.

Please do not confuse synchronous writes with asynchronous I/O -- that's a different beast entirely. I am curious as to why exactly the OS write system calls against TEMP are synchronous if data integrity is not an issue, that's all.

Thank you.

VC Received on Thu May 13 2004 - 12:45:00 CDT