Re: ZFS & Oracle

Joe Frohne wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I searched the archives for general ZFS information and found a few
> threads about ZFS and snapshots. These threads are about a year old.
> I am wondering if there is any general impression of running Oracle
> 10.2.x under ZFS today. Are people doing it successfully? What are
> the good, the bad and the ugly of running Oracle under ZFS?
>

here there is quite good article about ZFS in general http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Evil_Tuning_Guide#Tuning_is_Evil in section Additional ZFS References You 'll find few sensible articles with focus on databases

we use ZFS for MySQL only so no experience with Oracle directly, but there are some similarities, when considering innodb in general recordsize of ZFS should be equal to db block size, redologs should be separated (though with MySQL we have no this enabled, but as long as performance is satisfactory, we do not change configuration) and with max recordsize (i.e.128k). There is not much more - one can tune few other things, but these are dependent on one's traffic, and sometimes do not mean much. And one more thing - use the last available version.
I think that somewhere in one of those articles I saw comparison to UFS (with direct IO) and that was ZFS performance=3/4 UFS performance, so UFS wins

And from personal experience - from time to time our host looses its visibility of ZFS resources. I am not too technical to explain why, and thought that we do not need to trouble it after last patches were added more than a half year ago, but now experience higher traffic and problems returned.
While such things hit us, I believe MySQL can loose some commited transactions - probably tx records are handed to the ZFS, while it is already in some instable state, confirmation is returned, while buffers do not persist physically on disk or something like that. Of course it can be problem inflicted by composition of our traffic, our hardware (x86 arch), our staying at some earlier version of ZFS and so on.

Regards
Remigiusz

-- 
--

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Remigiusz Sokolowski <rems_at_wp-sa.pl>
WP/PTI/DIP/ZAB (+04858) 52 15 770
MySQL v04.x,05.x; Oracle v10.x

Zastrzezenia:
1. Wylaczenie danej funkcjonalnosci oznacza, ze niezwlocznie przystapimy
   lub juz pracujemy nad jej uruchomieniem
2. Niniejsza wiadomosc stanowi jedynie wyraz prywatnych pogladow autora 
   i nie jest w zadnym wypadku zwiazana ze stanowiskiem przedsiebiorstwa 
   Wirtualna Polska S.A.
------------------------------------------------------------------------



WIRTUALNA  POLSKA  SA, ul. Traugutta 115c, 80-226 Gdansk; NIP: 957-07-51-216; 
Sad Rejonowy Gdansk-Polnoc KRS 0000068548, kapital zakladowy 62.880.024 zlotych (w calosci wplacony)
--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l