Re: RAID Performance Issue with Oracle

pmaruse_at_hargray.com (Peter Marusek) wrote:
>I was told in Oracle school that RAID devices were not suitable for
>Oracle databases. Can anyone quantify the performance issues here?
>thanx
>Peter Marusek
>
>
Peter,

The suitability of various RAID levels for Oracle database applications depends a great deal on the nature of the application. RAID5 provides very good performance for read-mostly applications (DSS or data warehousing) which depend on the capability to service multiple independent queries and large sequential reads. However, RAID5 exacts a very heavy performance in on-line and batch transaction processing environments and other mixed read/write environments (for such environments, RAID1 may be a better choice).

There are numerous articles/papers regarding performance/tuning of RAID storage devices under various scenarios. There was recently a good, concise non-technical article in SunWorld Online (http://www.sun.com) which discussed some of the strong and weak points of some of the more widely used RAID levels. There are also numerous papers on RAID device performance/tuning available by anonymous ftp. A good place to start would be: ftp.cs.berkeley.edu.

hope this helps.

regards,
Chuck

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