Niall,
> On the other hand it might not be the best platform for your database
> itself just yet http://blogs.sun.com/roch/date/20060922 -
Yes, I'm aware of that blog entry by Roch even before I posted my reply
to Mladen.
In my mind, "best platform" is such a broad term and a "best platform"
for one organization may not be the best for another.
But even at the filesystem level, I am not going to say/argue that ZFS
is the "best" filesystem to run anyone's database against, for what is
best for me might not be the best for others.
In my case, I would like to consider factors other than performance when
choosing what is best for my specific situation. At the filesystem
level, I will most *likely* use raw for critical files IF performance is
all I'm after. But if UFS or ZFS is good enough (performance-wise) for
a specific application, then I may choose to use one of them simply
because they offer other things. I accept the fact that like most
things, I can't have everything I want.
But even is ZFS is not the "best" for a specific application, please
note that in Solaris, ZFS can *co-exist* with other filesystems. One
can put the database in raw, UFS, VxFS, or ay other filesystem. Then, a
ZFS filesystem can be created just for the purpose of what is being
discussed in this thread -- to compress datapump output on the fly.
> It'd be fun to see those numbers with compression on :(
I don't think that in this context, we should be comparing performance
between compressed vs. uncompressed filesystems. The task that is being
discussed in this thread is to compress the datapump file -- on the fly.
Compressing the datapump file will eat up CPU cycles whether it is
done by the filesystem or some other program. Therefore, if one wants
to measure performance, what should be measured is the time it takes to
do the entire task.
Again, the topic is compressing datapump output on the fly. Mark and
Mladen mentioned compressed filesystems. That is the reason I mentioned
ZFS. I think that ZFS is *a* solution that can address that specific
problem.
I have not tried datapump with ZFS but I see no reason why it won't
work. Is it "supported" by Oracle? I don't know.
Lastly, here's a 2.8GB Oracle extended SQL trace file that is sitting in
a ZFS filesystem in my box. The size of this 2.8GB on disk is 776MB:
----
jforonda@u20$ ls -lh test_ora_17255_t.trc
-r--r--r-- 1 jforonda staff 2.8G Sep 11 2004 test_ora_17255_t.trc
jforonda@u20$ du -sh test_ora_17255_t.trc
776M test_ora_17255_t.trc
jforonda@u20$
----
Applications don't have to know that the file is compressed.
Compression and decompression is done by ZFS. In other words, the file
can be accessed like any UNcompressed file. Like this:
----
jforonda@u20$ tail -5 test_ora_17255_t.trc
END OF STMT
PARSE #21:c=0,e=123,p=0,cr=0,cu=0,mis=0,r=0,dep=1,og=4,tim=740525621053
BINDS #21:
EXEC #21:c=0,e=259,p=0,cr=0,cu=0,mis=0,r=0,dep=1,og=4,tim=740525621393
EXEC #3:c=0,e=3416,p=0,cr=1,cu=3,mis=0,r=1,dep=0,og=4,tim=740525622047
jforonda@u20$
----
Thanks.
James
http://jforonda.blogspot.com
