Raw or Cooked for Informix Blob Spaces

[Tommy Brown]

Hello Folks,
I have read several prior posts regarding raw vs cooked. We run Raw Informix and Cooked Oracle 10g. We are well aware of the general performance and management issues. However, we will be implementing some Informix BLOB spaces for scanned objects and were wondering if any one else done this using cooked space for the BLOBs. It appears that exporting the data may be a problem where as the cooked space would allow some standard backup tools to make life potentially easier. Does any one have nay experience with this?
Thanks, Tommy

[TwoProc]

Well,

It was years and years ago - but I used to run Informix on cooked file systems. It ran fine, and, if I remember correctly, it was saddled with its share of blob data from survey collection. Certainly, as you can imagine, on cooked file systems all of the backup solutions you can think of are available to you.

However, I think your question mostly concerns questions the data conversion. FWIW, I wouldn't think that would be an issue with supplied Informix tools.

The main thing I'd be concerned with is that if you took the I/O on the server and made it, in a sense relatively serial(depending on setup as to how much that is, of course), would it still be fast enough?

For the applications we used back then, the I/O was pretty much job-at-time, so the concurrency of I/O wasn't much of a concern. Somehow, I'm betting that with your application though, more than likely it is a concern. So, I think in general situations when you wonder if you can take on a potentially "slower" (read into that what you will), that is a more restrictive technology stack or methodology, you're probably going to have to pressure test.

Wish I had more current info to give you.

[Tommy Brown]

Thanks TwoProc,
I am not intending to convert my existing DBSPACES to cooked, I remember in some class that Informix can handle mixed spaces. We are thinking of just the BLOBs being cooked. Our current DB is under 15GB, We are not sure what the grown of scanned objects will be. We perform DP5.5 hat Informix backups every night and a DBexport every night. and an On-tape every weekend to allow us some flexibility of recovery. We are not sure how the BLOBs will fit into this.
Thanks again,
I will award points later.
Tommy

[George_Dodds]

In my last job we migrated our informix db's from using raw to cooked spaces to make taking backups easier and as our san was out of warranty.

We had 4 x 300gb db's and it did make taking backups a lot easier.

Unfortunately we ended up using NAS storage and nfs mounts for the cooked filesystems which did cause some issue's, allthough it is still running.