Veritas Storage Foundation™ for Oracle 5.0.1 Administrator's Guide

■ Converting existing database files to 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 choose one of two

approaches: 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

convert them with the qio_convertdbfiles command.

■ If you choose to create new files, they 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 91.

■ You may also want to consider creating Quick I/O files for

temporary tablespaces.

See “Creating database files as Quick I/O files using qiomkfile”

on page 79.

■ 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.

■ 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.

Usage notes

The following options are available for the qio_getdbfiles command:

Lets you include all datafiles, including those that are potentially

sparse.

(Use this option only for debugging purposes, as sparse files are not

candidates for use with Quick I/O.)

-a

Using Veritas Quick I/O

Converting Oracle files to Quick I/O files