Improving the performance of cooked-file dbspaces by using direct I/O

On UNIX™ systems, you can improve the performance of cooked files used for dbspace chunks by using direct I/O.

Before you begin

Direct I/O must be available and the file system must support direct I/0 for the page size used for the dbspace chunk.

About this task

You can use HCL OneDB™ to use either raw devices or cooked files for dbspace chunks. In general, cooked files are slower because of the additional overhead and buffering provided by the file system. Direct I/O bypasses the use of the file system buffers, and therefore is more efficient for reads and writes that go to disk. You specify direct I/O with the DIRECT_IO configuration parameter. If your file system supports direct I/O for the page size used for the dbspace chunk and you use direct I/O, performance for cooked files can approach the performance of raw devices used for dbspace chunks.

To improve the performance of cooked-file dbspaces by using direct I/O:

Procedure

  1. Verify that you have direct I/O and the file system supports direct I/O for the page size used for the dbspace chunk.
  2. Enable direct I/O by setting the DIRECT_IO configuration parameter to 1.

Results

If you have an AIX® operating system, you can also enable concurrent I/O for HCL OneDB to use with direct IO when reading and writing to chunks that use cooked files.

For more information about using direct IO or concurrent IO, see the HCL OneDB Performance Guide.