I'm a Solaris SA and my Oracle DBA can't
answer my question. Maybe you guys can help
me out?
What is the recommended location/layout for
Oracle database files? I've been told that
certain types of files should not be placed
with other certain types of files (example,
indexes should not be placed on same physical
device as data), but I cannot remember the
specifics. Also, that some files should be
placed on one type of RAID and not another.
Also, when possible, that some should be
placed on raw slices. I'd rather not go the
raw route. What I'm trying to is avoid I/O
contention on the disks/filesystems. Are
these recommendations written down somewhere
for me to reference? Any rules of thumb? I'm
not having much luck on my own, and my DBA is
more familiar with Windoze than UNIX/Solaris.
At least that's his excuse. I suspect that he
knows the answers but is holding out on me
(clash of the Solaris SA and Oracle DBA
camps, I guess, and I'm stuck in the middle).
We're running Solaris 2.x, but that shouldn't
make a difference. We're also using UFS, Sun
A1000 (hardware RAID), Sun A5200 (software
RAID), Veritas Volume Manager v3.x.x, and
Oracle 8.0.5/8.0.6, 8i, and 9i. Generically
speaking, none of this should make a
difference either. But they're options we
have that we can play with.
While I've got your attention, do any of you
have experience with Oracle 8.0.6 on Solaris
2.6 and using the "forcedirectio" option to
the mount command? Any warnings, gotcha's,
performance improvements/degradations using
this? Any Oracle-related filesystems that
should NOT be mounted with this option. We're
NOT using Veritas File System (VxFS), Quick
I/O, raw, or other methods on this particular
box and we don't have these as options; it's
basic VxVM RAID (O, 1, and 0+1) on vanilla
UFS.
Thanks,
SCB