Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Wednesday 2008-02-13 at 13:51 +0200, Dirk Moolman wrote:
Sorry, let me explain.
We are using Oracle. Oracle uses filesystems to create datafiles in, for example it will create files like:
/oradata01/system01.dbf /oradata02/users01.dbf
Now if /oradata02 (a new filesystem I created) points to the device /dev/sda, instead of /dev/sda1 (a partition on sda), will this be a problem ?
I don't believe you can do this. I may be wrong but I believe you will need to create a single partition /dev/sda1 that encompasses the entire disk and use that.
As far as I know, which isn't that much, there should be no problem. I assume the space is initialized (mkfs)? You can test it: write a file using the entire space in the disk (dd if=/dev/null of=...), check the kernel log.
It is also possible to write a single file to a device, without filesystem (raw). I understand some databases did/do that. Being a entire device there is no problem with partition limits and overwriting another partition space, and it is supposed to be faster.
As for raw devices, I believe you can use the raw command to bind a raw device to a disk partition. The speed improvement is not due to the partition structure but the raw construct. The database engine is free to handle the I/O with the device rather than having to deal with the inefficiencies/help of the filesystem.
-- Cheers, Carlos E. R.
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