VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Oracle Administrator's Guide

Converting Oracle Files to Quick I/O Files Prerelease 8 September 2005, 8:54am
94 VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle Administrator’s Guide
Usage Notes
◆ Converting existing database files to be Quick I/O files may not be the best choice if the files
are fragmented. Use the -f option to determine the fragmentation levels and either:
◆ Exclude files that are highly fragmented and do not have sufficient contiguous extents for
Quick I/O use.
or
◆ Create new files with the qiomkfile command, rather than converting the files using
the qio_convertdbfiles command. The new files will be contiguous. You must
then move data from the old files to the new files using the dd(1M) command or a
database import facility, and then define the new files to the database.
◆ By default, qio_getdbfiles skips any tablespaces marked TEMPORARY. Tablespaces
marked TEMPORARY can be sparse, which means that not all blocks in the file are allocated.
Quick I/O files cannot be sparse, as Quick I/O provides a raw-type interface to storage. If a
sparse file is converted to a Quick I/O file, the Oracle instance can fail if Oracle attempts to
write into one of these unallocated blocks. See “Handling Oracle Temporary Tablespaces and
Quick I/O” on page 99 for more information.
For information on creating Quick I/O files for temporary tablespaces, see “Creating Database
Files as Quick I/O Files Using qiomkfile” on page 88.
◆ Instead of using the qio_getdbfiles command, you can manually create the mkqio.dat
file containing the Oracle database filenames that you want to convert to Quick I/O files.
The qio_convertdbfiles command exits and prints an error message if any of the
database files are not on a VxFS file system. If this happens, you must remove any non-VxFS
files from the mkqio.dat file before running the qio_convertdbfiles command.
-h Displays a help message.
-i Creates the extra links for all datafiles and log files in the /dev directory to support
SAP’s brbackup.
-T Lets you specify the type of database as ora. Specify this option only in environments
where the type of database is ambiguous (for example, when multiple types of database
environment variables, such as $ORACLE_SID, SYBASE, DSQUERY, and
$DB2INSTANCE are present on a server).
-u Changes Quick I/O files back to regular files. Use this option to undo changes made by a
previous run of the qio_convertdbfiles script.