Compaq 112726-001 - ProLiant - 6500 White Paper page 13

DSS Sizing and Tuning of Oracle8 for Windows NT on CompaqServers
Windows NT File System
Compaq testing indicated a 4%-7% performance gain when using raw devices over FAT or
NTFS file systems in Windows NT. Compaq recommends using FAT for the initial boot
partition to allow booting from a DOS diskette in emergencies to do repair work. Windows NT
and Oracle executables are placed on the FAT partition as well. The system, log and data files
are normally placed on NTFS or RAW file partitions. If you are I/O bound with your system, you
may switch the log and data files to RAW partitions to gain I/O performance. You will, however,
be limited by the restrictions of using RAW devices (i.e. backup, copy, etc.). Using Oracle8's
backup utility, OCOPY80, and MKS Toolkit's dd functionality, you can minimize the impact of
these restrictions. Each RAW partition equates to a single file and can be represented by a single
drive letter (i.e., \\.\E:), or logical physical drive number (i.e., \\.\PhysicalDrive0) or, if you have
many partitions per disk, as symbolic links (i.e., \\.\ORA_PARTITION_1 where
ORA_PARTITION_1 is defined using Oracle's setlinks utility).
Oracle8 Server
Install the Oracle partition option. This option is needed for Oracle parallel query and partition
functionality.
Use ORADIM80 to create each Oracle8 instance. ORADIM80 (Oracle Database Instance
Manager) creates each database instance and assigns the administrator user ID and password. If
you are recreating an Oracle8 instance, you will want to delete the old instance using:
oradim80 -delete -sid SSSS
before creating the new instance using:
oradim80 -new -sid SSSS -intpwd PWD -maxusers U -startmode manual
where SSSS is your instance ID, PWD is your internal password and U is the maximum number
of internal users.
Use the Windows NT Registry Editor to make any necessary changes to the Oracle configuration
parameters (for example, ORACLE_SID, LOCAL, ORACLE_HOME, and so on). The default
setting for ORACLE_PRIORITY is CLASS:normal;DEF:normal. This can be set to
CLASS:HIGH;DEF:7. The console will seem sluggish but can be fixed by increasing the
foreground window priority under Control Panel – System - Performance.
See Figure 8 for Windows NT Registry settings for ORACLE.
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