Customer Forum 2012 -- Commercial Database I/O Configurations

[Ed_Menze]

This was the very first presentation at our very first SAMG Customer Forum (straight after the event welcome) so the entire forum was in attendance. We therefore wanted to start this first session by explaining some fundamental building blocks used during i/o (disk sectors, file system blocks and memory pages) and their sizes, alignment and correlation, before then moving on to the more detailed feature specific information in this and subsequent sessions during the forum.

The usual abundant number of acronyms called for a quick reference handout for our session, the acronyms are listed yet again below to tempt you once more! As well as explaining the I/O configuration choices for database environments we also wanted to stick by the forum theme of “By Engineers for Engineers” so added some interesting command level examples (using simple dd commands) that included some easily invoked and exciting [to us Engineering folks at least] tracing at the Volume Manager layer to help demonstrate buffered i/o and direct i/o differences as well as file fragmentation etc..

The attached slides offer a small reminder only of course, as presenters we all felt that a week each may have been more adequate for the detailed info we wanted to share!! We hope everyone enjoyed this first session and that it gave the event the kick-off start we were hoping for. Thanks for the questions that were asked during the session itself and taking such great interest in what we presented on the day, please obviously ask any further questions that may come to mind as and when you might revisit the session slides.

Best regards,

Colin Eldridge and Ed Menze

Acronym	Description
BIO	File system buffered i/o
DIO	Direct i/o
DDIO	Discovered direct i/o
QIO	Quick i/o
CQIO	Cached QIO
CIO	Concurrent i/o
ODM	Oracle Disk Manager
CODM	Cached ODM

commercial_database_config-pub.pdf ‏553 KB