Re: Oracle datafiles across an NFS

In article <42n42l$bfn_at_allnews.infi.net>, Mike Cuppett <cuppettm_at_richmond.infi.net> wrote:

>Is anyone running Oracle in a manner in which a datafile resides on a
>separate computer via a NFS?

No. Do not do this. It is evil. If you do it, demons will swoop down upon you late at night and steal your soul. You will be forced to patch old COBOL code to handle turn-of-the-century dates.

>During a data conversion recently, more
>space was required than was available on the machine running Oracle. The
>Unix SA mounted an NFS to a different machine, but I was unable to create
>a datafile in the NFS. I attended an Oracle class several weeks back and
>posed this question to the instructor, but she had never seen an Oracle
>implementation involving an NFS.

It's a common enough question... must be a newbie instructor. Remember who it was?

Never never never remote-mount a datafile, not on NFS, not on Netware, not on anything. Oracle expects to be able to flush the write cache. Can you guarantee me that a network write really is done before Oracle gets control back?

Can you say "unrecoverable crash"?

There are probably other reasons as well. Security, perhaps.

 -Tom

-- 
Thomas B. Cox   tcox_at_netcom.com
Author of _Oracle Workgroup Server Handbook_, ISBN 0-07-881186-4

...be seeing you at IOUW '95!