Re: AW: Copy-on-write file systems

Nenad,

Thanks for the clarification!

There is more to ZFS than the version supported by Oracle on Solaris, as evidenced HERE
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#List_of_operating_systems_supporting_ZFS>. There is likely cause for concern due to the layoffs last week, but only for Oracle ZFS products.  Please be aware that, alongside Oracle ZFS, there is OpenZFS <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenZFS> for Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, and OpenSolaris platforms, and OpenZFS on Linux will survive whatever direction Oracle chooses for its proprietary version.

The other thing to keep in mind is that ZFS is a building block toward solutions, just as Oracle database is a building block toward solutions.  For example, nobody builds a custom ERP application in-house anymore, and likewise the same is true with what you're discussing.  The use-case you are considering (i.e. dev/test agility) is the primary use-case for which Delphix is designed. Delphix is based upon OpenZFS and one of the original inventors of ZFS (Matt Ahrens) is a principal and founding member of our engineering team.  Over the past 7 years, he and this team have significantly enhanced DxFS (based on OpenZFS).

Full disclosure:  I work for Delphix and my job is to install/deploy for customers; please consider my responses with that in mind.

Please let me know if you want more information?

Thanks!

-Tim

On 9/3/17 16:15, Noveljic Nenad wrote:
> Tim,
>
> I'm apologising for not being precise enough.
>
> The main requirements are related to agility:
> 1. Fast fallback and rollback in the case of upgrades and tests.
> 2. Fast provisioning of test and development databases based on a
> source database.
>
> Both requirements have been achieved by the means of ZFS snapshot,
> rollback and clone commands.
>
> Furthermore, ZFS has significantly simplified capacity management.
> What I mean by that is Unix admins provision the space in the pools
> (zpools), and the space is being allocated to individual ZFSs as the
> databases are growing. This makes the DBA life easier if there are
> 20-30 databases in a Solaris container, as it is much cheaper to
> always keep some spare capacity in the pool to account for an
> unexpected growth than to micromanage individual databases.
>
> On the other hand, the main disadvantage has been so far that
> sometimes the quality of new releases left something to be desired
> for. As a consequence, we've been occasionally spending more time for
> troubleshooting and performance tuning than we had budgeted for. These
> are the examples of the problems we've been encountering over the past
> years:
>
> http://nenadnoveljic.com/blog/arc-resizing-user_reserve_hint_pct/
>
> http://nenadnoveljic.com/blog/solaris-11-3-hang-kernel-object-manager/
>
>
> I've been using ZFS since it was released in Solaris 10. In my
> opinion, its benefits far outweigh its disadvantages. The reason I'm
> thinking about alternatives are the recent layouts of Solaris
> engineers by the Oracle Corporation.
>
> Finally, let me mention that I'm willing to accept some penalty in
> performance which is inherent to copy-on-write file systems (see Bart
> Sjerps' blog post
> https://bartsjerps.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/zfs-ora-database-fragmentation/
> ) in exchange for the features which would help fulfilling the
> aforementioned agility requirements.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nenad
>
>
>
> Gesendet über BlackBerry Work
> (www.blackberry.com)
>
> *Von: *Noveljic Nenad <nenad.noveljic_at_vontobel.ch
> <mailto:nenad.noveljic_at_vontobel.ch>>
> *Datum *Montag, 04. Sep. 2017, 12:14 AM
> *An: *gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com <gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com
> <mailto:gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com>>, oracle-l_at_freelists.org
> <oracle-l_at_freelists.org <mailto:oracle-l_at_freelists.org>>
> *Betreff: *AW: Copy-on-write file systems
>
>
>> Hi Mladen,
>>
>> Thank you for your feedback!
>>
>> ACFS seems to be a viable alternative to ZFS then.
>>
>> I'm surprised to hear about good benchmark results of ZFS on Linux. I
>> thought that ZFS has not been integrated into the Linux Kernel, i.e.
>> that the ZFS processes are running in the user space.
>>
>> As already mentioned, I've been successfully using ZFS from its very
>> beginning, but I've got the impression that its future is uncertain.
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>> Nenad
>
> Gesendet über BlackBerry Work
> (www.blackberry.com)
>
> *Von: *Mladen Gogala <gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com
> <mailto:gogala.mladen_at_gmail.com>>
> *Datum *Sonntag, 03. Sep. 2017, 11:54 PM
> *An: *oracle-l_at_freelists.org <oracle-l_at_freelists.org
> <mailto:oracle-l_at_freelists.org>>
> *Betreff: *Re: Copy-on-write file systems
>
> Not being able to afford a T5 super-cluster, I am playing with ZFS on
> Linux. It is surprisingly good, no complaints at all. Here are two
> pages about ZFS beating Ext4 on benchmark:
>
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu-xenial-zfs&num=1
> https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/35594-zfs-vs-ext4-zfs-wins
>
> ZFS is a very decent file system.
>
> On 09/03/2017 02:47 PM, Tim Gorman wrote:
>> Nenad,
>>
>> It is helpful to share those requirements, as it is not useful to
>> make recommendations without them?
>>
>> What is it that you're trying to accomplish?  What did ZFS do right,
>> and at what did it fail?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> -Tim
>>
>>
>>
>> On 9/3/17 04:16, Noveljic Nenad wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> Is anybody running databases on ACFS or some other copy-on-write
>>>> file system?
>>>>
>>>> I'd be greatful if you could share your experiences.
>>>> I'm looking for alternatives to ZFS, which has had fulfilled most
>>>> of our requirements so far.
>>>>
>>>> Many thanks in advance,
>>>>
>>>> Nenad
>>>
>>>
>>> Gesendet über BlackBerry Work
>>> (www.blackberry.com)
>>>
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>
> --
> Mladen Gogala
> Oracle DBA
> Tel: (347) 321-1217
>
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