RAW volume size limitation?

[Joe Short]

I am building an MCSG/eRac cluster for a client. They requested that one of the raw volumes be 60GB in size. I created the volume without problem, but Oracle cannot access it. Oracle says that this is an operating system limitation. The only thing I could think of is a ulimit issue, but Oracle is set to an unlimited ulimit.
Is there something I am missing?

[Steven E. Protter]

That number is not a limit.

There is a limit when a volume group is created with vgcreate on how many pe_units can be in the overall volume group.

thats controlled by the parameters -e max_pe and -s pe_size

You may want to do vgdisplay on the volume group and see if you have hit some kind of limits.

SEP

[Joe Short]

This is not the issue, if it were a PE issue, I would not have been able to create the logical volume. It is Oracle acessing the logical volume, it acts a if it doesn't recognise it at all.

[John Palmer · Accepted solution]

What's the specific Oracle error that you're getting?

According to metalink...
IMPORTANT: There is a generic limit on the maximum Oracle datafile size of 4million Oracle data blocks. The exact limit is 4194303 * DB_BLOCK_SIZE.

This is approx 32Gb for an 8k blocksize.

[Hein van den Heuvel]

Are you getting an error like:

SQL> create tablespace hein datafile '/tmp/hein.dbf' size 40000M;
create tablespace hein datafile '/tmp/hein.dbf' size 40000M
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-01144: File size (5120000 blocks) exceeds maximum of 4194303 blocks

Like John already wrote, this is an Oracle limitation, not a platform restriction.

You'd need a pagesize of 16K to be able to create a 60GB tablespace with just one file.
The saving grace might be that Oracle 9i allows mixed blocksizes, so you can just do that!

But why not simply create 1 60G tablespace with 2*30GB file (raw devices)?

hth,
Hein.