NFS and Stats Collection in Oracle 11g

A few more 11g new features – that you might not have heard about yet – which stand out in my opinion!

Direct NFS

First, Kevin just posted whitepaper/press release links and made some comments about Direct NFS. Oracle 10g introduced ASM – streamlining hardware access by effectively allowing the database engine to bypass all that kernel filesystem code. In 11g it looks like they’ve done the same thing with NFS.

Direct NFS is an NFS client built directly into the database kernel. Two big advantages: first, it streamlines data access by bypassing code paths into the kernel and providing code that’s optimized for only what the database needs. Secondly there’s no more fussing with mount settings for NFS mounts – since Oracle controls it internally the right window sizes and sync settings will always be there.

I’m not quite as sold on it as Kevin is since my biggest issue with NFS has always been lack of instrumentation – and Direct NFS is going to remove the tiny bit of instrumentation that we did have (from nfsstat). (At least with ASM you still can look at I/O latencies and transfer rates through the iostat utility…) But this idea definitely has potential and I do like it a lot despite my hangups. And actually it’s possible that with the NFS code in the Oracle kernel they could provide instrumentation that the OS has never provided.

Statistics Collection

I haven’t really heard anyone else talk about this yet – but there was a slide during the 11g Launch that showed performance improvements of various processes. I don’t remember who the presenter was – but they didn’t even mention the graph in the bottom right corner which showed the most dramatic improvement off all the features! Nothing is guaranteed until they actually release the software but it from that slide it looked like Oracle has sped up statistics collection very dramatically. I don’t know the details but I’m curious to see.

Other Buzz in the Blogosphere

It’s been an especially entertaining 24 hours. :) For one, Doug pointed out a thread on Oracle forums that I hadn’t seen before. Also, yesterday I mentioned the name change from “Secure Files” to “Fast Files” and Kevin picked up on this too. And of course, lots of posts about 11g – including Arup’s upcoming series on 11g new features, which I’m really looking forward to!