Re: Filesystem a factor in DB transaction speed ?

In article <1007233010.877269_at_news>, "Forrest Cicogni" <fcicogni_at_sageasset.com> wrote:

> While it is true that there exists file systems outperforming NTFS, the
> point is nearly moot. Oracle depends less upon underlying file systems
> than other programs, thanks to efficiently designed contiguous data files
> and read/write buffering. File systems, fast or not, are the single
> greatest source of bottlenecking, and the object of a well designed
> Oracle database is to nearly eliminate disk I/O all together. Therefore,
> focus on tuning and designing, and rely less upon finding faster hardware
> to make up for poor implementations. The old adage still applies: "Fast
> computers breed lazy programmers."

Well, I haven't done any benchmarks, but according to the popular legend, by far the best results are achieved on raw devices which have no file system at all. The truth is that oracle does it's own buffering and that any additional buffering by the OS is a waste of resources. The holy grail of the whole atabase worldis a file system which will be able to bypass buffering in a fashion similar to Veritas, only supported by oracle , which will not impose a significant overhead on the system and which will be able to work on clusters. In other words, we are still looking for the ideal mixture of Files11, XFS and Veritas which would be able to do what the raw devices are doing all along. As far as I am concerned, ReiserFS is ideal for what I'm using it for: a ton of small & medium size files ranging from progrograms, articles, spreadsheets to the mp3 files and not for the heavy duty database processing. That is what EMC and and raw devices are for.

-- 
Mladen Gogala