Carlos E. R. wrote:
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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 ?
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.
As I recall, Oracle gets even better performance if you just use a raw disk partition -- it is capable of managing block placement on a raw disk, and gets much better perfomance than by using the disk space through a filesystem driver. That being said, if he decides to use the "whole disk" which includes the 1 or 2 blocks normally reserved for the partition table as part of his raw block device, he's just begging for data loss if the disk is ever removed from the system and put in another for some reason (hey! this partition table makes no sense -- that must be the problem -- I'll remake the first partition to use the whole disk...and wham, the first 512 - 1024 bytes are overwritten).
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.
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