Oracle Tips by Burleson

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!

System Considerations

Within each Oracle installation there are several operating system considerations that must be taken into account. These affect how Oracle uses global memory and processes memory areas. The Remote DBAs will be responsible for tuning and maintaining these areas.

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