Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Oracle10g Grid Computing with RAC
Chapter 5 - Preparing Shared Storage

Oracle Cluster File System

OCFS is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The source code for the binaries shipped with the RPM's are directly available in the source RPMS (.src.rpm) for reference and compliance. Oracle will only formally support the binary RPM's compiled by Oracle and downloadable for Red Hat Advanced Server or United Linux. Oracle provides OCFS product support to customers that already have an Oracle support license.

For Linux and Windows

With the active support from open source community, Oracle has developed the cluster file system (OCFS) for use in Red Hat Linux and United Linux, and released it as an open source. It is available in the form of RPM packages. Users can download it for free. OCFS only supports Oracle data files, redo log files, and control files. It is not a general-purpose file system. It does not support a shared Oracle Home at least not until Version 2 is released.

OCFS requires the use of the operating system's o_direct compile-time flag to get direct I/O. I/O must be performed through aligned buffers with 512 byte (or multiples thereof) buffer offsets. These are details the Oracle server takes care of. The Oracle RAC database manages all the difficult concurrency issues and maintains the data integrity of the application just as it does when using raw partitions.

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