Tuning at the disk level and strategies to distribute Oracle files

There are many Oracle background and foreground processes involved in a database instance; each of them specializes in a certain operation. In this recipe we will see what operations are executed by each process and what type of interaction takes place between files. On this basis, we will establish a strategy to distribute the Oracle files on different disks to help improve performance.

Tip

In Chapter 9, Tuning Memory, we have seen that the Oracle database uses different O/S processes on *nix machines, and different threads inside the same process on Windows machines, to obtain the same functionalities. In this chapter, when we refer to processes, we are talking about either *nix O/S processes or Windows threads.

Getting ready

To monitor and diagnose I/O performance issues, we need to enable timed statistics in the database, by setting the appropriate initialization parameter:

ALTER SYSTEM SET TIMED_STATISTICS = TRUE;

Without...