Oracle for Netware Question

Hi Folks:

We are in the process of bringing a new NetWare 3.11 production server online. It is a i486 DX2-66 EISA box with 64 MB of RAM and three 2 GB Fast/Wide SCSI-2 disk drives. We a running v.6 of the Oracle database supporting a maximum of 32 concurrent users.

We are considering using a larger NetWare block size to reduce the RAM requirements of NetWare for caching the FAT, DT, etc. For example, using the standard Novell formula (i.e., (DiskSpace * .023 / BlockSize) + 2MB for NetWare OS) we have calculated Novell's recommended RAM requirements as follows:

   NetWare OS + 6 GB of Disk using 4KB blocks.... 36.50 MB    NetWare OS + 6 GB of Disk using 8KB blocks.... 19.25 MB

It seems to us that using a larger NetWare block size will leave more RAM available for Oracle. We are aware that using larger blocks will leave more wasted space, especially when dealing with many smaller files. However, since we are using this file server as a dedicated Database Server we do not expect this to cause a problem.

Since Oracle uses the DIRECTFS.NLM to bypass NetWare caching, what are the consequences of choosing a larger NetWare block size for some of the volumes (e.g., 8KB)? What impact, if any, would this have on Oracle's block size? What effect would this have on Oracle read performance verses write performance?   

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Todd Hickey                          Voice: (709) 729-7176 
Sr. Programmer/Analyst                 Fax: (709) 729-7002
Enterprise Nfld & Labrador          E-Mail: Todd_Hickey_at_mailer.entnet.nf.ca