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Donald K. Burleson
Oracle Tips |
Oracle Tape Systems
Nine-track, 4mm, 8mm, and the infamous
TK series from DEC can be used to provide a medium for archive logs
and exports. One problem with doing so, however, most installations
require operator monitoring of the tape devices to switch cartridges
and reels. With the advent of stacker-loader drives for the
cartridge tapes, and tape libraries such as those provided by
StorageTek, this limitation has all but been eliminated in all but
the smallest shops.
Oracle Random Access Memory (RAM) Drives
Though RAM drives have been around for several years, they have
failed to gain the popularity their speed and reliability would seem
to warrant. One reason has been their small capacity in comparison
to other storage mediums. Several manufacturers offer solid-state
drives of steadily increasing capacities. For index storage, these
devices are excellent. Their major strength is their innate speed.
They also have onboard battery backup sufficient to back up their
contents to their built-in hard drives. This backup is an automatic
procedure invisible to the user, as is the reload of data upon power
restoration.
The major drawback to RAM drives is their high cost. However, rapid
reductions in memory chip costs, along with the equally rapid
increase in the amount of storage per chip, may soon render this
drawback nonexistent. Use of RAM drives for temporary tablespaces
and index tablespaces, as well as for lookup and easily rebuilt
tables, could increase processing speeds severalfold. At last check
the cost for a RAM drive in the 16 gigabyte capacity range was about
$20,000.00 so beware, they are pricey!
This is an
excerpt by Mike Ault’s book “Oracle
Administration & Management”. If you want more current Oracle tips
by Mike Ault, check out his new book “Mike
Ault’s Oracle Internals Monitoring & Tuning Scripts” or
Ault’s Oracle Scripts Download.
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