Re: diff between raw device and ufs in solaris

Unless your client is well-versed in the administration of raw devices, I would discourage this. Place in front of your client some "what-if" scenarios having to do with database backups, database restorations, disk failures, and so on, and ask him if he would know how to deal with them, especially when his database disks do not appear in the output of the df, mount, et al shell commands.

Remember, the purchase of one additional CPU card to get more performance out of a mounted filesystem may be more than offset by the trouble and lost business (downtime) caused by a dba or sysop who is confounded by some peculiarity of raw devices and who does just one thing wrong at one particular instant.

Just my $.02 -- if the shop knows raw devices inside and out, then none of this is applicable to your situation. But in many cases in my own experience (admittedly on other platforms) the sysops wish they'd never traded the admin ease of filesystems for the minor performance increases they got from re-creating the database on raw devices.

One more thought... a few hours' worth of tuning might get you the same or more performance increase than going to raw ever would; I've seen cases where fixing just ONE BOGUS SQL STATEMENT using explain plan has made huge performance improvements!

FWIW........

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