Veritas Cached Quick I/O maintains and extends the database performance benefits of Veritas Quick I/O by making more efficient use of large, unused system memory through a selective buffering mechanism. Cached Quick I/O also supports features that support buffering behavior, such as file system read-ahead.
Enabling Cached Quick I/O on suitable Quick I/O files improves database performance by using the file system buffer cache to store data. This data storage speeds up system reads by accessing the system buffer cache and avoiding disk I/O when searching for information.
Having data at the cache level improves database performance in the following ways:
For read operations, Cached Quick I/O caches database blocks in the system buffer cache, which can reduce the number of physical I/O operations and therefore improve read performance.
For write operations, Cached Quick I/O uses a direct-write, copy-behind technique to preserve its buffer copy of the data. After the direct I/O is scheduled and while it is waiting for the completion of the I/O, the file system updates its buffer to reflect the changed data being written out. For online transaction processing, Cached Quick I/O achieves better than raw device performance in database throughput on large platforms with very large physical memories.
For sequential table scans, Cached Quick I/O can significantly reduce the query response time because of the read-ahead algorithm used by Veritas File System. If a user needs to read the same range in the file while the data is still in cache, the system is likely to return an immediate cache hit rather than scan for data on the disk.