RE: Data Pump and compress on the fly in Unix

  • From: "Leng Kaing" <Leng.Kaing@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <James.Foronda@xxxxxxx>, "Niall Litchfield" <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 14:41:59 +1100

Sorry, I think I missed something here... ZFS is just another file
system. It's NOT a compressed file system, right? 

Anyone knows when Oracle will be supporting ZFS?
 
-----Original Message-----
From: James.Foronda@xxxxxxx [mailto:James.Foronda@xxxxxxx] 
Sent: Friday, 12 January 2007 1:39 AM
To: Niall Litchfield
Cc: mgogala@xxxxxxxxxxx; pythianbrinsmead@xxxxxxxxx; Leng Kaing;
oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Data Pump and compress on the fly in Unix

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


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