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I've been supporting a lot of Oracle databases (not full-time; I'm a programmer 90% of the time) and I just happened to see in the Oracle 19 Linux Installation document that storing Oracle data files on a local file system is not recommended. All the databases I've been supporting have the data on a local file system.

We are setting up a new server that has 5 internal drives; 2 small drives for the operating system, and 3 large (four terabyte) drives. So, seems like I could do what I'm familiar with, set up RAID 5 on the 3 large drives, pointing to /u01. Or, set up ASM on those drives. I played with ASM maybe 10 years ago, so I'm not terribly familiar with it.

For this new server, a data center DBA group will be setting this up and maintaining it. So I'm basically wondering if there are any things I need to be aware of when setting this up with data on ASM. And also, for our existing databases, how important is it to migrate from local Linux file system to ASM.

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    Have a look at forums.oracle.com/ords/apexds/post/… As you anyway have dedicated disc for data, I would also suggest ASM
    – Wernfried Domscheit
    Mar 16 at 8:54
  • Wow! Good link with nice reasons for this old dog (me) to learn new tricks. I forgot about how ASM lets you add/remove a disk drive from ASM while the database just keeps working.
    – Mark Stewart
    Mar 16 at 12:50

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Just an overstatement from Oracle. They like to overengineer things.

Using ASM is the common practice for Oracle cluster databases.

Sure, it has some nice features, which you will never ever use in such a simple system. Also, it is not like it will have a huge impact on performance. There are databases with dozens of TBs in size that work just as well on other filesystems, not to mention the smaller ones.

There is no need to throw away everything and start migrating your databases from local filesystems to ASM for questionable gains and increased complexity.

That specific system, I would just KISS (keep it simple stupid).

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  • Thanks; the KISS is probably the best option especially now, as we are "surprisingly" behind schedule. We may be consolidating the older stuff in the near future so in the future some of those nice to have might be enough to go with ASM. But yes, might be limited benefit.
    – Mark Stewart
    Mar 16 at 15:58

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