The Oracle paper, "
Tuning an Oracle8i Database running Linux", goes over file system choices for a Linux DB, and it explains what benchmarks you should use when evaluating file systems for a DB server. You won't believe this, but ext3 wins over ext2, ReiserFS, JFS, and RAW. While saying that the results are counter-intuitive may be an understatement, he didn't benchmark XFS so I would very interested to see those results. Is XFS supported by Oracle?