[CLUE-Tech] Sybase versions

[Dan Harris]

On Friday 28 June 2002 10:35 am, Jed S. Baer wrote:

> Well, no help with Sybase, but automatic database sizing can be a bad
> thing. 

In my experiences, it's more of a good thing than a bad thing.  If you run out 
of space on the "device" compared to the actual disk partition, it will 
result in the same inability to insert or update.  Either can be resolved 
with careful monitoring (which I have in place).  The upside to using 
auto-expanding is that I don't have to guess ahead of time how much space is 
going to be needed for each device.  I don't waste any space that is 
earmarked for future expansion.

Another problem with the "device" concept is that, at least in old versions of 
Sybase, you couldn't extend a device.  You had to create a NEW device and 
extend the database onto it.  This led to a single database spread across 
multiple devices on different disks.  Sure it works, but in comparison to a 
single "file" on a very large partition, it's unnecessary complexity.  I'd 
rather stick my database storage on a 200+GB RAID-5 partition and not have to 
mess with storage requirements for a long time.

I understand the performance advantages to having different devices on 
different disks/controllers, etc... but I'd trade it for the simplicity of 
management of auto-expanding files.

Thanks for the input!