Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 08/07/06 07:12

DA Morgan (damorgan@psoug.org) writes:
> Erland Sommarskog wrote:
>> Correct. A binary collation comes with a price. So does raw partitions.
>
> Would you please explain what you intend with this comment about block
> devices. With any database, other apparently than Microsoft's, there is
> an advantage that accrues to those who forgo file systems. Why is SQL
> Server different?

I referred previously in the thread to a fellow MVP who had found a 20%
improvement with raw devices over the file system.

The price I'm talking about is the more complex administration that raw
devices buy you.

As for why they are complex... Many years ago when I worked with Sybase,
I had to travel to customer to perform a triple upgrade: upgrade HP-UX
from 8.0 to 9.0, Sybase from 4.2 to 4.9 and our own application. The
customer had adequate staff to run the OS upgrade themselves, but still
they wanted us to it. The reason: in this OS upgrade HP-UX introduced
logical volumes, having had only fixed partitions before, and the customer
did not know how to handle Sybase, where all data was on raw partitions.
Had the databases been on plain files, the OS upgrade would have been
trivial for them. But in those days, Sybase strongly discouraged you from
running production databases on file-system devices, and with a good reason,
since buffering in the file system could cause problems.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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