Need a compressed file system temporarily

[Yong Huang]

> On 06Oct2009 08:14, Yong Huang <yong321 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> | I have RHEL 4 or 5 with standard installation. I need a compressed file
> | system temporarily to store an Oracle data pump export file. What's the
> | easiest solution? Oracle data pump does not support a sequential device
> | as its output so I can't pipe the output to gzip or compress.
> 
> Does it actually do random I/O to the dump file, or does it simply
> require you to specify a filename with no _convenient_ pipe output
> syntax?
> 
> If it is only an invocation issue, thus:
> 
>   oracle-data-pump-command filename
>  
> you may be able to check and use a named pipe:
> 
>   mknod p foo
>   gzip <foo >foo.gz &
>   oracle-data-pump-command foo

Oracle's official document says data pump export does not support pipes as output (unlike the conventional export for which people usually create a named pipe as you showed). It probably does random I/O to the dump file.

I researched some options for natively compressed file systems for Linux. I just want to know which one people think is the easiest. Not a big deal. Squashfs.sourceforge.net looks promising. Thanks.

Yong Huang