Summary : Tuning DEC UNIX for Oracle

From: Holmberg, Viktor <Viktor.Holmberg_at_abnamro.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1998 10:46:13 +0000

Well there was limited feedback on this one. I was hoping for the
flood-gates to open, but alas no.

It seems there is limited knowledge out there about specifically tuning
oracle and dunix. I find this very surprising.

I have included all the replies here.

Thanks
Viktor

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>From : Randall R. Cable[SMTP:randy.cable_at_mci.com]

First part of your question regarding file systems... Unless youa re
planning to run OPS, I would stay away from raw files... I would
recommend
Advfs, as well as LSM... Work between DBA and sysadmin to design your
containers, do your raid striping in both hardware and software...

As far as tunig for Oracle, there are books aon the subject... Oracle
has a
set of manuals that I know my last DBA's constantly had me changing
kernel
params to optimize their performance...

The following web site is a good place to start, Think of your database
as
a web site taking many small hits...

>http://www.digital.com/info/internet/document/ias/tuning.html#Recommend
ations
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        From : alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com[SMTP:alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com]

        There's not a lot of file system parameters that can be
        tuned, but the guide to tuning may offer some clues. On
        the HSZ side your only choices are:

                o RAID level
                o Whether to use the Writeback cache.

        If the database can issue multiple I/O requests in parallel
        a RAID level has some advantage over plain disks, since the
        array controller can spread the load evenly among the disks.
        Setting the chunk size for striping and RAID-5 is the most
        interesting tunable. The documentation for the controller
        should offer clues how to select the chunk size. RAID-0
        offers the best capacity/performance, but no redundancy.
        RAID-1 offers the best redundancy and better read performance,
        but uses more disks and the write performance is worse. RAID-5
        offers redundancy and striping like read performance, but
        also has relatively poor write performance. Combining striping
        and RAID-1 offers good performance and redundancy, but uses
        more devices.

        The write back cache can significantly help write performance,
        except in cases where the write load is constant. It also
        helps for RAID-5 and RAID-1 performance in general. But it
        places the data at a slight risk. The memory used to implement
        the cache is non-volatile due to the presense of a battery
        to keep it on during a power failure. If the battery fails,
        the NVRAM fails. The HSZ40 had a very poor battery history,
        so the HSZ50 and HSZ70 batteries were redesigned. I'm lead
        to believe that in the presense of good batteries, the NVRAM
        is much more reliable than the underlying disks.

        If the I/O load seen by the controller consists of lots of
        write and read-back, then read caching on the controller
        can help a lot. If Oracle does no data caching when run
        on top of a raw device, this is a possible I/O load. If
        Oracle does their own caching or relies on the file system
        cache, the reads will satisfied by the cache on the host
        and the controller read cache won't be of much value.

        Using raw devices has the advantage of avoiding a data copy
        from the kernel buffer cache to user space. It also may have
        a slightly shorter I/O path. In a purely random I/O load
        this may be an advantage to performance. In a sequential
        load, UFS and I think AdvFS will do read-ahead in the file
        system, which can significantly improve performance.

        So, a lot of the choices depend on how you use the database.

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>From larry.magnello_at_usa.net

you can start by running unicensus with sys_check. It will tell you what
parameters to add to sysconfigtab.

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Received on Mon Oct 26 1998 - 14:57:30 NZDT

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