Hi 
Charles,
 
Your 
DBA doesn't understand what qtrees are about. Not his fault, he's probably used 
to working with block I/O storage.
 
A tree 
quota applied to a qtree will incur the same performance hit regardless of the 
state of the qtree "capacity". i.e. every write will require a hash table 
comparison, which may cause it to respond with a "disk full" if the quota limit 
is reached, or an alteration (usually an increment) to the hash 
table if the write is completed successfully. One of the NetApp guys can 
provide a more accurate technical description, but that's the general idea. You 
can resize the tree quota both ways in front of the DBA to help him understand 
that tree quotas have nothing to do with the layout of data on the disks. (i.e. 
increase the tree quota so the qtree is only 40% full, run a DB test, shrink the 
tree quota so it's 99% full then run the same test).
 
However, he is correct of course that there will be a 
performance impact when the parent VOLUME is nearly full.
 
 
 
  
  Hi, 
  We're running a test oracle DB connected to a netapp 
  filer. 
  Our DBA is convinced that when the qtrees are close to full 
  (>90%) the performance goes down despite the fact that the parent volume is 
  only 50% full.
  Does this make sense or is it more likely the apparently 
  slowdown is coming from somewhere else? 
  -C.