Hi,

What factors do we need to be aware of relating to Firebird and RAID controllers?

We have a customer using a Firebird 2.0.6 Classic Server database on a single disk connected to an IBM ServeRAID M5015 SAS/SATA Controller. The disk is not part of any RAID array. The server is running Windows 2008 R2 64-bit.

Performance in this configuration is much slower than when the disk is not connected to the RAID controller. Other applications and database services running on the same hardware do not have any difference in performance based on how the disk is connected to the computer.

Extensive consultation with IBM has not resolved the issue, and they feel that Firebird must be the cause of the performance issues.

I have spent some time researching this topic, and came across a case in 2004 where someone had a similar experience with Firebird 1.5 and Windows 2000.[1] I also found a case in 2010 where a user had found issues with writes above a certain size with an unknown RAID controller.[2]

Are there any RAID controllers known to be incompatible with Firebird?

Are there recommendations we can make to our customers to prevent them from experiencing issues like these when attempting to deploy RAID based servers?

We are currently migrating to Firebird 2.5. Have any issues been fixed that would have an impact on performance when running on RAID?

Regards,
Gareth Marshall

[1] http://forums.devshed.com/firebird-sql-development-61/firebird-and-raid-176267.html
[2] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/firebird-support/message/111015