Re: ASM for single-instance 11g db server?

From: Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2011 13:07:53 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <pan.2011.04.04.13.07.52_at_gmail.com>



On Mon, 04 Apr 2011 01:53:01 -0700, mhoys wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Is ASM actually recommended for a single-instance (non-RAC) Oracle 11g
> installation on Linux, when the storage redundancy is managed by a SAN?
> Is there a performance benefit when using ASM instead of ext3 or even
> the newer ext4 filesystems?
> Any good white papers out there?
>
> Thanks,
> Matthias

Mathias, ASM is usually used with RAC. That's about it. ASM is a nonstandard  storage method which doesn't allow things like ls, tar,cpio, cp, gzip or other Windows utilities. ASM requires a separate Oracle instance and cannot be used by anything but Oracle. ASM was invented to prevent the competition from using Oracle technology for competing products. As for ext[2,3,4] family of file systems, it's sub-standard in quality and I would stay away from it, if at all possible. JFS will provide better performance than Ext3 and is less prone to fragmentation. Ext4 is an extent based FS which was released without defragmenter. As a matter of fact, Ext4 still has no defragmenter. There is a general purpose file system defragmenter called "shake", but it's not what I expected from ext4.
Long story short, stay away from ASM, unless your database is RAC, in which case it's pretty much the only reasonable choice.

-- 
http://mgogala.byethost5.com
Received on Mon Apr 04 2011 - 08:07:53 CDT

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