Oracle on ram drive with no redo log or other archiving

My company is trying to setup an oracle instance that would run on a ram drive (memory mounted as a drive in linux) in order to provide lightning speed execution for testing a complex application. I had a couple of questions about how to minimize all oracle logging and which exact files should go on the ram drive for highests speed execution. Below I first describe the setup and then my questions.

I know this will be very grating for the experts to hear but in this case the data is not at all important. If the box crashes in the middle of the test we do not care about the data and it's ok that it's lost because the test data scenario is generated on every run by the test setup.

To make this work we first do a vanilla oracle install on a normal durable file system. Then once we set up all the users, tablespaces, etc we shutdown oracle and move the datafiles to the ram drive (and remap the directories with symlinks).

Then we start up oracle and it's happy. It does not know the aweful truth that its data files are in RAM (and we don't care in this case). If the box is power-cycled the init scripts mount the ramdrive and then copy the datafiles to from the initial durable install to the ram drive. Then we start oracle. At this point oracle is blank and ready to go. We then generate the test data and run the tests 100 faster than on normal disk.

Question:

1. How can I start oracle to minimize or disable redo log? I know there is a NOARCHIVE mode. Is that it? How do I enable it for the whole instance?
2. What other logs are there and how can I turn them off (or minimize output)
3. What other files besides that data files for the tablespaces used by tests need to be in RAM drive for fastest performance. In other words, if I have a regular oracle account and just execute vanilla updates where does Oracle write to besides the redo log and the data files.

Note that not all are in RAM. Since ram is expensive it would be preferrable to keep the files that are changing rarely in durable location and then only put the files that actually affect performance on the ram drive.

Thanks,

• robert