RAID5 and Oracle 7.3.4

I'm a relative newbie to the DBA world of Oracle and have been handed an Oracle 7.3.4 system to manage. The database server is a Sun 5500 Enterprise Server running Solaris 2.6. It has 4, 400 Mhz CPUs, a 100 Mhz bus, and an ES1000 controller running RAID5 over 4, 18 Gb discs. I've been assured that our server does not lack speed or raw performance thanks to the 4 SMP processors and bus architecture (no argument here).

With all this being said, I am concerned about how to best utilize this system while minimizing I/O contention during write intensive operations and/or other performance degradation. I've read several articles recommending the use of separate physical devices for each specific type of tablespace: SYSTEM, DATA1, DATA2, RBS, INDEX, TEMP, etc. This doesn't appear to be an option for the system at hand.

I would like to layout the tablespaces to best use the physical devices available and plan on organizing the needed tablespaces on appropriate logical volumes. Are there any other considerations I should factor in regarding location?

How does the SMP factor into this? Should we be considering tuning with parallel query statement in our SQL?

Is this database destined to suffer degraded performance for the sake of the recoverability offered by the operating system and RAID5?

Is there a good, recent reference for these concerns?

I've got a million more questions, but will resist the urge for now.

Thanks for any info you can provide,

Andy Received on Sat May 22 1999 - 21:52:25 CDT