That's my understanding as well. Low-level IO calls for raw IO are still gates into OS code. Less restrictive than a call to a file system layer, but still handled by the OS. -- Cheers Nuno Souto dbvision@xxxxxxxxxxxx On 29/03/2013 1:29 PM, Ric Van Dyke wrote: > The Operating System ALWAYS does the IO. > > Cooked, baked or RAW, might be different OS calls, but it's still an OS > job to do the IO. Oracle may look like an operating system but it > isn't. It's "just another" application running on the system. > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l