I wouldn't use ASM in a non RAC enviroment if not for testing. And certainly not in local drives, there is no point. In that case RAW devices would perform better and filesystem would be way simpler. Just my opinion though. Guillermo Alan Bort DBA / DBA Main Team EDS, an HP company From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Robert Freeman Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 12:40 PM To: niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx; jkstill@xxxxxxxxx Cc: dannorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; VIVEK_SHARMA@xxxxxxxxxxx; Greg Rahn; ORACLE-L Subject: Re: ASM I am hard pressed to find enough good reasons to use ASM over cooked on a protected file system (ie: RAID) in a non-RAC environment most of the time.... However, given what I think the future of ASM might become, this might change at some point in time. Ya never know... ;-) RF Robert G. Freeman Author: Oracle Database 11g New Features (Oracle Press) Portable DBA: Oracle (Oracle Press) Oracle Database 10g New Features (Oracle Press) Oracle9i RMAN Backup and Recovery (Oracle Press) Oracle9i New Feature Blog: http://robertgfreeman.blogspot.com (Oracle Press) The LDS Church is looking for DBA's. You must be LDS to apply (please don't write to me and tell me I'm breaking the law. A church can choose to hire members of it's own faith. Look it up if you don't believe me). ----- Original Message ---- From: Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx> To: jkstill@xxxxxxxxx Cc: dannorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; VIVEK_SHARMA@xxxxxxxxxxx; Greg Rahn <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; ORACLE-L <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 9:25:21 AM Subject: Re: ASM Reasons for ASM that I can see. I agree with most of your negatives :). * Ease of file management - which is mostly OMF rather than ASM per se. (that's a disagreement!) * Ease of disk management - having the ability to migrate a db from one set of physical disks to another witout downtime is very, very cool. * On windows avoiding the whole drive letter management thing. Now against that, and in addition to Jared's points. I'd ask why consider a storage solution that only works for Oracle files (and even then not all Oracle files. I keep other files on my servers you know. Including stuff you'd expect to be there like alert.logs, cron scripts and so on. On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 8:48 PM, Jared Still <jkstill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 6:21 AM, Dan Norris <dannorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: If you would, please share with us your reasons to avoid ASM. Based on your response, I'm guessing that the reasons might include "because that's the way I've always done it". Personally, I don't use it as it adds more complexity to our environment. We (by which I really me 'I') don't need to add any more complexity. * Additional instance for ASM * file management is simpler * storage admins have easy direct access to see what's on disk. I'm sure there are some rebuttals to this. Let's hear 'em! Jared Still Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.orawin.info