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From: kbittner@oracle.uucp (Kurt Bittner)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Ingres and NFS
Message-ID: <1990Oct30.151205.5406@oracle.com>
Date: 30 Oct 90 15:12:05 GMT
References: <4691@spdcc.SPDCC.COM>
Reply-To: kbittner@oracle.UUCP (Kurt Bittner)
Organization: Oracle Corporation, Belmont, CA
Lines: 22

In article <4691@spdcc.SPDCC.COM> dyer@ursa-major.spdcc.com (Steve Dyer) writes:
>
>I've heard that Ingres rel 6 "doesn't work" on NFS.  I'd like
>to get a better restatement or a refutation of the problem. 
>

I'm certainly not an expert on Ingres, but there is a general problem with NFS
that affects all DBMS's running under it:  NFS is stateless.  This means that in
the event of a system or network crash, NFS doesn't know enough information 
about what was going on at the time of the crash to do anything like a
transaction recovery or rollback.  As a result, a database running on NFS would
have a high likelihood of corruption in the event of a crash. 

In general, I wouldn't be real excited about someone using NFS for a database
application even if it is technically possible.  Most database vendors now
provide the ability to use client-server software to achieve distrubuted access
to data that go beyond NFS in their capabilities (at least as far as the
DBMS app is concerned).  This is not to say, however, that you can't run other
apps on the same machine using NFS, just don't use it for the DBMS.

---
"My opinions are solely my own and do not reflect those of my employer."