Re: Compressing oracle *.dbf files / Dangerous?

In article <1993Oct8.205019.10082_at_exlog.com> lparsons_at_exlog.com (Lee Parsons) writes:
>In article <D8YHBHSN_at_gwdu03.gwdg.de> plewe_at_dl.mpi-dortmund.mpg.de (J.Plewe) writes:
>>Esa Karell (karell_at_cs.Helsinki.FI) wrote:
>>: An Oracle rep told me that they strongly advise
>>: against compressing oracle's db files. I've used
>>: gtar with -Z (tar + compress) and never had any problems
>>: when restored from a backup tape. I looked at db files
>>: (aix, oracle 6.0.36) and none of them looked strange (e.g. sparse).
>>: Pls, tell if there's more to it than what I know.
>>: --

[ Bunch of stuff you can read in the original post ]

>I did think that this was an old problem that was resolved by writing
>smarter utilities but I sure somebody out there is running a version
>that will cause them problems.

MISINFORMATION ALERT Actually after some tests it looks like that this problem was fixed at a much lower level. Having manually created a sparse file I couldn't read anything back but NULLs. This is the correct behavior but I suspect that a LONG time ago this was not what read returned.

The bottom line is I dont think this a problem for most of us and it is easy to test.

-- 
Regards, 

Lee E. Parsons                  		Baker Hughes Inteq, Inc
Oracle Database Administrator 			lparsons_at_exlog.com