Raw Device Usage

[dwfink]

The endless raw v. cooked debate goes on... I need a little information about reality from the user community. The basic idea is "How popular are raw devices for Oracle databases?" I don't need technical information, but a general picture of usage.

What percentage of the databases that you have (had) worked on are using raw devices?
What platforms (Solaris/WinNT/etc) are they used on?
What was the justification for using them?

Thanks for the assist

[michaell]

In the old days and in theory, raw device is slightly faster than cook device. It is recommended by Oracle and Sybase to use raw device if possible. For all of our customers database, we don't use raw device as it is not as easily managed as cook device. The Unix server and the disk IO is now so fast that raw vs cook is not an issue anymore. In addition, most of our customers are using RAID. So we don't really care about raw device anyone.

If my understanding is correct, raw device only available on Unix but not NT. So you have no choice if you are using NT.

[julian]

I use raw devices in back-end PROD but just because we have to (OPS, no other way)...