Kbase P119698: What are the advantages and disadvantages of using multiple small database extents
| Autor |
Progress Software Corporation - Progress |
| Acesso |
Público |
| Publicação |
10/16/2008 |
|
Status: Unverified
GOAL:
What are the advantages and disadvantages of using multiple small database extents
FIX:
Having a database with many small extents was meaningful back in the days where RAID was uncommon and expensive: by having small extents distributed across several physical disks, we could achieve some level of striping without the RAID hardware. Another reason for having small extents was that back then some types of file systems had performance problems handling "large files" (300Mb or more).
With the current technology, where hardware disk striping is available even on motherboards for low-end PC's, and file systems are capable of handling multi-gigabyte files efficiently, it's much preferable to have fewer, larger database extents and place them on a striped set of disks. This has the additional advantage of using fewer OS resources, thus resulting in fewer chances of hitting OS or product limits.