mounting shared file system for Oracle and multiple machines

First, thanks for the help on disaster recovery. I never got a definitive answer on whether I only need the hot backups or both the hot and cold, but I received some things I can try out.

Now, I have a question about having a common shared area for "utl_file_dir" access for Oracle on multiple machines.

Currently, we create extract files, ftp them to another server, run a stored procedure (or package) that uses the utl_file_dir (I think that's the one) and they read and/or write files to that directory and then ftp and on and on and on...

I got a request to have a staging area (group of disks) setup that can be NFS mounted by multiple machines and look local to them (i.e. /u09/stage_data). Many machines would could mount this and I would set the "utl_file_dir" to point to it.

Our AIX admin said it's possible, but I don't think it's a good enough reason to do it. I'm not an AIX expert and don't know the impact/overhead/risks of doing it. From a dba point of view, I'm looking for opinions. I see a couple of problems like: what happens if the disks go down? Multiple machines are affected. Security??? I'm not sure on this
Troubleshooting? I can see it being a potential problem that's not obvious to figure out
disks fill up? potentially all instances sharing it are affected garbage can or heavy maintenance??? it becomes a trash can and I'm unable to determine what I can clean up
more or less network traffic??? I don't know. I can't imagine you eliminate the ftp. It's a sql net transfer instead I guess.

From the programming staff, they thought because it would look local it would eliminate ftp's. Like I said above, data still has to be passed back and forth. I don' t think sqlnet is faster than ftp...

Any input would be apprecated.

Thanks,
Steve Received on Tue Sep 22 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT