Veritas File System 5.0 Administrator's Guide (September 2006)

If you create a symbolic link using a relative path name, both the symbolic link
and the file are under the same parent directory. If you want to relocate the file,
both the file and the symbolic link must be moved.
It is also possible to use the absolute path name when creating a symbolic link. If
the database file is relocated to another directory, you must change the symbolic
link to use the new absolute path. You can put all the symbolic links in a directory
separate from the data directories. For example, you can create a directory named
/database and put in all the symbolic links, with the symbolic links pointing to
absolute path names.
Preallocating files using the setext command
You can use the VxFS setext command to preallocate file space, but the setext
command requires superuser privileges. You may need to use the chown and chgrp
commands to change the owner and group permissions on the file after it is
created.
See the setext(1M) manual page.
The following example shows how to use setext to create a 100 MB database file
for an Oracle database.
To preallocate files using setext
1
Go to the /database file system:
# cd /database
2
Create the .dbfile file:
# touch .dbfile
3
Reserve 100 MB for the .dbfile file using setext:
# setext -r 102400 -f noreserve -f chgsize .dbfile
4
Create a symbolic link to .dbfile:
# ln -s .dbfile::cdev:vxfs: dbfile
189Quick I/O for Databases
Accessing regular VxFS files through symbolic links