Hrrrmmmm - as a wine-drinking, vegetarian, non-weightlifting new yawk
city boy, this explains why I never fit in with the storage crowd....

However, to address the original idea about striping across lots of
disks, etc., you have to be very careful about how you configure your
storage volumes depending on your storage arrays.  The "intelligence"
that is built-in to high-end frames can be outsmarted (for better or
worse) by certain storage configurations.  Case in point - you have an
EMC array that exposes 9 GB RAID-1 volumes that you use Veritas to
create stripe sets across.  You make a 10-volume RAID-0 stripe and
following the "match the filesystem block size to the oracle block size"
principle you make the stripe depth 8k.  This makes a certain degree of
sense - linear reads and writes getting distributed among a number of
physical spindles, helps mitigate hotspots, etc.  However, on a
Symmetrix, this will yield poor(er) performance results.  This is
because of two factors - one, regardless of the I/O on the host side,
the Symm will always do backend I/O and cache allocation in 32k objects
and two, the symmetrix readahead won't kick in until it sees two or
three sequential tracks being requested within a certain minimum amount
of time.  So, the small stripe size ends up unnecessarily placing
objects in cache and negates the readahead that can provide large
performance enhancements.  There's a whole host of oddities like these
that are present in all of the major storage vendors, so you have to be
aware of what's going to happen.

The moral of the story is, of course, the more expensive your storage
array, the more you benefit by knowing the hows and whys of what your
storage array does.  Also try not to be too smart about how you set up
your storage unless you have a very deep understanding of the
intelligence behind the storage - it'll help keep you from shooting
yourself in the foot.  I've seen too many oracle DBAs spend hours
creating a "highly tuned" storage configuration based on faulty or
lacking information on how the storage array actually works and then
they complain about how slow the array is....

Thanks,

Matt

--
Matthew Zito
GridApp Systems
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cell: 646-220-3551
Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359
http://www.gridapp.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On 
> Behalf Of Stephen Lee
> Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 10:25 AM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: RE: should you seperate indexes from tables in 
> seperate datafiles
> 
> 
> 
> Steroids, weight lifting, and a flattop hair cut (orange or 
> green).  After two years of this, try talking to the storage 
> guys while holding a beer in one hand and a Polish sausage in 
> the other.  If you can manage a good belch during the 
> conversation, even better.
> 
> (Are you a visual person?)
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > get to control how my disks are set up (part of that "now 
> now little 
> > girl, don't you worry your pretty little head about how the 
> disks are 
> > set up, you just leave that sort of stuff to us big <male> 
> data center 
> > operations people" crap I get)
> -- 
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> -- 
> Author: Stephen Lee
>   INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
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-- 
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-- 
Author: Matthew Zito
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