RE: lack of raw disk devices

Petrucci, Joseph (PetruccJ@kochind.com)
Sat, 10 Jan 1998 08:50:23 -0600


>venaas@nvg.ntnu.no wrote
>Sent: Saturday, January 10, 1998 8:00 AM
>Subject: Re: lack of raw disk devices

>> About an earlier message from me:
>> Both Oracle and Sybase can use filesystems instead of raw
devices Sybase
>> recommends Raw for data integrity incase of failure because
of the way
>> UNIX systems (and I'm assuming linux) buffers its writes.
>
>I asked some guy from Oracle about this, and he said that when
he
>installed Oracle for customers, he preferred not to use raw
devices,
>simply because too many losers accidentally wiped it out,
thinking it
>was a free partition. According to him, the performance
increase from
>raw devices were at most 10-20% depending on the OS and file
system.
>He also had Oracle up and running on Linux BTW.
>
>Stig

Normally your correct but in some write intensive systems Oracle
recommends raw devices
(look on the oracle home page for tuning whitepapers) as to
"losers" accidentally wiping out
disks maybe he should get better control of his machines.

JP