oracle names - pros/cons

 I have been tasked with researching the pros and cons of using Oracle Names Servers vs. TNSNAMES files. I know that Oracle Names is supposed to give you a single point of maintenance for database name resolution.

In our environment (Oracle on NT, NT clients), we have used the TNS_ADMIN registry key to relocate the SQLNET.ORA and TNSNAMES.ORA files to a shared server location. This gives us the single point of maintenance offered by Oracle Names. Are there any other advantages to O-Names? Maintenance? Admin? Performance? Any disadvantages? I would expect it to be a bit of a performance hit over even our server shared TNSNAMES simply because it is a more complex mechanism with another service running on the server and broadcasting itself over the network, but really don't know.

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Ed Stevens
(Opinions are not necessarily those of my employer)


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