Real-world Oracle disks

I'm an Oracle newbie buying an IBM RS/6000 or expanding a Sun to run Oracle. At the Oracle DBA training they recommended lots of small drives (500 Mb. or 1 Gb.) for the best i/o through table/index separation. Makes sense. But try to do that and it starts looking a little complicated.

We've got a quote for a RS/6000 with 4 internal 2 Gb. drives and 4 external 4.5 Gb. drives. What I was wondering was:

1. What sort of configurations are people (satisfied DBA's) using in the real-world?
2. Does the above sound reasonable for Oracle?

Yeah, I know, you can't answer question #2 without knowing the size of the databases, how many tables will typically be joined in our applications, and how heavily they're gonna be used.

Also, are people typically/commonly using striping to not even have to worry about explicitly placing tables and indexes -- sheer Hell for control-freaks, I suppose.

Thanks,

Mark Judman (Mark_Judman_at_colpal.com)
Colgate-Palmolive Co. Received on Thu Mar 16 1995 - 17:49:37 CST