Re: Compressing oracle *.dbf files / Dangerous?

From: Vipin Gokhale <vgokhale_at_us.oracle.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1993 18:45:10 GMT
Message-ID: <1993Oct12.184510.2825_at_oracle.us.oracle.com>


--
In article <1993Oct8.212918.16386_at_exlog.com>, lparsons_at_exlog.com (Lee Parsons) writes:

>Newsgroups: comp.databases.oracle
>From: lparsons_at_exlog.com (Lee Parsons)
>Subject: Re: Compressing oracle *.dbf files / Dangerous?
>
>In article <1993Oct8.205019.10082_at_exlog.com> lparsons_at_exlog.com (Lee Parsons) writes:
>>In article <D8YHBHSN_at_gwdu03.gwdg.de> plewe_at_dl.mpi-dortmund.mpg.de (J.Plewe) writes:
>>>Esa Karell (karell_at_cs.Helsinki.FI) wrote:
>>>: An Oracle rep told me that they strongly advise
>>>: against compressing oracle's db files. I've used
>>>: gtar with -Z (tar + compress) and never had any problems
>>>: when restored from a backup tape. I looked at db files
>>>: (aix, oracle 6.0.36) and none of them looked strange (e.g. sparse).
>>>: Pls, tell if there's more to it than what I know.
>>>: --
>
>[ Bunch of stuff you can read in the original post ]
>
>>I did think that this was an old problem that was resolved by writing
>>smarter utilities but I sure somebody out there is running a version
>>that will cause them problems.
>
>MISINFORMATION ALERT
>
>Actually after some tests it looks like that this problem was fixed
>at a much lower level. Having manually created a sparse file I couldn't
>read anything back but NULLs. This is the correct behavior but I suspect
>that a LONG time ago this was not what read returned.
>
>The bottom line is I dont think this a problem for most of us and it is
>easy to test.
>--
>Regards,
>
>Lee E. Parsons Baker Hughes Inteq, Inc
>Oracle Database Administrator lparsons_at_exlog.com
>
Oracle database files are NOT sparse - we actually writes zeros to the file at database creation time. Baring any bugs in backup utilities, I don't see any problem compressing/uncompressing database files. -Vipin
Received on Tue Oct 12 1993 - 19:45:10 CET

Original text of this message