Defragmentation of Oracle 91 files on W2000 server

A client is testing a system on Oracle 9i and Win 2000 (why not 10g and 2003 etc? dont ask, long story).

Performance was poor. Among other issues, we discovered that the Oracle datafiles are badly fragmented. This is fragmentation in the Windows sense of the physical file being all over the disk, not the Oracles internal file fragmentation.
Each Oracle DB file is typically in several thousand fragments (I have no idea how it got that bad and finding out would take too long). The defrag program reports 112 files, 260GB total disk space, and an impressive 234,000 file fragments.

The problem: so far they cannot defragment the Oracle data & index files.

They have just tried to defragment the disk which works for other files not for the Oracle files (*.ora). They tried using Diskeeper and PerfectDisk with the same result.
They tried the defragment-at-boot-time options with these programs, i.e. to do the defrag before oracle starts up and perhaps prevents the ora files being moved. Still no good.

There is plenty of spare space (36%) on the disks which are NTFS RAID5.

Seems a silly problem, there must be an easy answer....? I am not an Oracle DBA by the way, but a general consultant looking at this along with some other issues. Received on Tue May 11 2004 - 12:14:08 CDT