Excerpts from mail: 1-Nov-95 Re: Oracle and AFS john [EMAIL PROTECTED] (3917)
> Dept. We run a network of 300+ Sun workstations for the entire College
> of Engineering. All the students have volumes in AFS and my mission in
life to make sure that's the only file space I need to manage.
I'm a strong proponent of using AFS for all its worth, but this idea
doesn't sound at all practical.
> The coursework is fairly straight forward, but each of the students needs
> to create their own databases, tables, and queries.
> The Oracle sales people about had a heart attack when I told them
> I wanted 40 floating "server" licenses.
No doubt. In the database arena, client/server is the only way to go.
Students can create and administer their own separate databases from
individual workstations via remote calls to a central server. A
plethora of DBMS tools are around to support this.
I don't see an advantage of requiring local, individual servers for
teaching purposes. The database itself is usually best implemented on a
non-UFS file system, anyway, for efficiency and performance reasons.
We once investigated using AFS for a database application (a campus-wide
help desk system), mostly for the convince of having a built-in backup &
recovery system and unlimited disk space, but concluded that AFS only
complicated an otherwise efficient system. We instead use a single
database engine (Sybase) with dedicated mirrored disks, and allow
client/server access from Unix hosts, PCs and Macs via a variety of
TCP/IP based tools, including the Web. We do, however, use AFS as
convenient way to perform nightly backups -- the server, being an AFS
client, dumps the databases each night via a cron job, then migrates the
dump to AFS for long term archiving. This is handy in that it doesn't
require flipping tapes or manual intervention.
