I am using Solaris 9 (Sparc based) with Sybase and a proprietary DB application that works with Sybase. In the past we have not used SVM or any RAID config. The DBs were configured such that each DB had its own partition.
Now I would like to setup a new machine with the DBs on a RAID5 config using SVM. This will be my first time using RAID5 or SVM.
I think that my proprietary app references raw partitions because its installer asks what raw partition each of the DBs resides on.
So my questions are:
1) Can each DB still be on its own raw partition (such as something like c0t0d0s3) with RAID5? Or does RAID5 inherently preclude this?
2) Can an application still reference raw partitions with RAID5? Maybe my app will accept soft partitions, I'm not sure. But first, I would like to understand if I am approaching this issue correctly.
I've read some things that imply this is not possible, that a file system or soft partitions have to be used. But I haven't found anything that sufficiently explains everything so that I can understand what the issues and problems are. I'm thinking that lots of people must use Sybase DBs with RAID5, so there must be an explanation that I'm just missing.
I've also read posts on various forums where it was said that I shouldn't even consider using Solaris 9 SVM RAID5, but no one ever explained why they had that opinion. I would be interested in any comments on that.