"Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 4 enables Oracle® Database 10g file system applications to perform within 3% of raw I/O due to enhancements to the ext3 file system and through the support of both Direct and Asynchronous I/O." http://www.redhat.com/magazine/013nov05/features/oracle/ How do you/they measure "data access patterns with very little data re-use?" -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l