Naive view of Oracle on RAID Subsystem?

Hi,
  I am new to Oracle and I am currently setting up a scientific database using Oracle 7 on a DEC Alpha 2100 with a 10GB RAID5 disk array.

In the docs, (maunals and the DBA Handbook) there is EXTENSIVE talk about how you should make sure that to increase recoverablility and decrease process I/O contention you should perform a stringent analyzation of your database's needs.

I can well see the need of this for a system where you have JBOD, but we have a RAID5 array.... This seems to reduce most of the topics discussed in the docs to nothing, at least the way I see it...

Disk data mirroring takes care of recoverability (along with a good tape backup schedule). And The stripping takes care (at least in a naive way) of the I/O contention b/c you will have your tables spread out over 6 disks and there will be much less contention for a particular disk to be read or written.

Again, I am very inexperienced with both Oracle and RAID. Am I completely off my rocker or does this make sense?

Thanks,
Dean Fuqua
fuqua_at_niehs.nih.gov   Received on Tue Dec 27 1994 - 21:58:30 CET