RAID Questions

Hello Netters.

I have several questions regarding the layout and design of Oracle7 on a machine using RAID. My company recently purchased an NCR 3555 quad Pentium server to act as host for our manufacturing system. This machine has five 1GB drives controlled by a hardware RAID controller configured for RAID 5. In laying down the database I've made several assumptions but before we go production on the new machine, I thought it wise to check with the mighty Oraphites as to whether their humble disciple was all wet or not.

Assumption 1:

Forget all about designing for balanced I/O, ie. distributing tablespaces across separate drives, because RAID 5 guarantees the load is distributed.

Assumption 2:

Forget about clustering and hashing for the same reasons. All this would do is fatten the dictionary and create additional overhead in manipulating dictionary objects.

Assuming that designing for portabilty to other hosts is not a concern, am I safe to make the two previous assumptions. I realize that if the database ever needed to be moved to a host that didn't support RAID, redesign for optimal performance would be necessary.

Last but not least, a question. The NCR RAID controller supports raw slices. On average, with all things being equal, how great of a performance increase can one expect to see by using raw slices. I need to weigh this against the administrative hassles of using raw slices.

Thanking all in advance,
Greg McLear
Mitchel & Scott Machine Co.

sans .signature Received on Sun Jan 09 1994 - 15:43:01 CET