RE: Oracle Names

A few more points:

1. If you use ONAMES, I think it's a good idea to use a region DB (we have an Oracle DB that we use as a repository for a couple of non-related items) for a few reasons. Primarily because I thought the concept of using one was easier for me to understand from a recovery standpoint (e.g. what would happen if we lost the primary ONAMES server?). I still don't know where the connection info is stored on ONAMES if you don't use a region DB, even after reviewing my Oracle Networking class notes (too reliant on GUIs!). And I can put the ONAMES region DB into archivelog mode to recover up-to-the-minute, whereas the non-region setup would be whenever the last backup/copy was.
2. Don't bother trying to figure out how to maintain your ONAMES data using the NAMESCTL utility. Use it to stop and start an ONAMES service and maybe to verify that an entry duplicated itself to your secondary ONAMES server ("query my_db_alias a.smd"), but that's about it. I've never found good examples on maintaining your entries thru this commandline util. Unfortunately in this case, stick with the GUI.
3. Changing an ONAMES entry is not supported! This may be troublesome if your IP domain changes, for example, or more likely if you move a DB from one server to another. For us, deleting an re-adding an entry through the GUI wasn't an option because that left room for human error as well as downtime for all Oracle DBs across the company during the change. So, we directly modified the entries the region DB via SQL DML without issue (ONRS_REGION table in the ONAMES schema of the repository). The rather huge caveat is that this direct intervention of Oracle-supplied table data is not supported, but the operation is very simple and has been <cross fingers> failsafe for us.
4. If your region DB goes down, your users probably won't know it. This is because the ONAMES servers themselves (always have at least two ONAMES servers, IMHO!) keep a local cache if the region DB goes down. The caches are updated every 24hours by default.
5. If the machine that your primary ONAMES server runs on goes down and you're using IP (a good chance), your users will notice a definite lag in connect times, probably 20-30 seconds. This is because of IP and not Oracle Networking. The client needs to timeout looking for the ONAMES server's machine before failing over to the secondary one. Your apps, however, are still available! Just the initial connections are slower.
6. OID? Ugh. Not mature yet, at least as of 9.0.2.
7. There's probably more, but my SAN test DB is almost done importing...

HTH! GL! Rich

Rich Jesse                           System/Database Administrator
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                  Quad/Tech Inc, Sussex, WI USA

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2003 2:02 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: Re: Oracle Names
>
>
> Dennis,
>
> For the same reasons that you mention, we implemented Oracle Names
> here just last year, despite Oracle's proclamation that it is
> going away
> in 10i.
> ( or whatever the next version is )
>
> Since we will be upgrading to Oracle 9i later this year, I'm not too
> worried about
> the depracation of Oracle Names.
>
> While Oracle Names is easy to setup, ODI is not.
>
> Oracle Names need not be a single point of failure, you can
> have multiple
> name servers running. It's a pretty lightweight process, so you can
> proliferate
> it to multiple servers without too much concern.
>
> It is *much* better than multiple tnsnames.ora files.
>
> Jared
>
>
>
>
>
>
> DENNIS WILLIAMS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 06/12/2003 10:49 AM
> Please respond to ORACLE-L
>
>
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> cc:
> Subject: Oracle Names
>
>
> We are starting a project that will eventually have 500
> laptops wandering
> around in the wild. These will have an Access database for
> untethered use,
> and will periodically connect to Oracle via Net8 to
> resynchronize itself.
> The idea of changing 500 tnsnames.ora files sometime down the line is
> daunting. I've been studying for the OCP Net8 exam, and they mention
> Oracle
> Names.
>
> 1. Are any of you using the Oracle Names?
> 2. Is it as easy to configure as Oracle makes it sound, or is it
> difficult?
> 3. Is Names reasonably robust? I can see this as yet another
> single point
> of
> failure.
> 4. Oracle hinted that Oracle Names is going away in favor of
> LDAP. Is this
> imminent, or just a scare tactic? I had held off using Names
> because of
> this, but the company has made a commitment to MS Active
> Directory, which
> I
> gather from the list postings isn't very compatible with
> Oracle's LDAP.
>
>
> Dennis Williams
> DBA, 80%OCP, 100% DBA
> Lifetouch, Inc.
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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