Re: lack of raw disk devices

Martin Schulze (venaas@nvg.ntnu.no)
Sat, 10 Jan 1998 14:59:49 +0100 (CET)

> 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