Re: Andrew File System

In article <lfeges.23.2FDFED1B_at_hookup.net>, Louis Feges <lfeges_at_hookup.net> wrote:
>Has anyone tried running Oracle using the Andrew File System?
>We have Oracle V7.0.15 on an AIX machine and are getting strange errors when
>attempting to install oracle on the AFS disk.The errors hint at the 'Kerberos
>security' used by AFS, but, ofcourse, do not clarify what exactly is the
>problem. I've notified Oracle Support, two days ago and counting... and
>waiting.

Are you trying to put the executables in AFS, or the database files?

We have a couple of Oracle servers under AIX here, and have been running AFS for the past 4 years or so, but we have never bothered putting the executables in AFS (we installed to local disk, and didn't have any reason to move the binaries to AFS.) We do have locally developed apps (using OCI) living in AFS space without any problem.

Our general practice here, is for all server (daemon) code to be run from local disk, so we want the server binaries to be on local disk anyway.

Although I have never tried it, I would think that putting the database files in AFS space would be a nightmare. Assuming you manage to provide access rights to the server processes (a pag shell and klog can handle that), it would seem that the server file writes would thrash your AFS cache and performance would be miserable. In any event, it seems cheaper to add disk to the Oracle server, than to add disk to the AFS server and have Oracle use that. I can see problems with the AFS backup scheme as well, since the database files would all instantly be cloned for backups, you would double your disk use.

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