A bit before Christmas I got an email from Kevin Closson asking me to take a look at a new undocumented Direct NFS (DNFS) feature in the 11.2.0.2 patch set. I think he wanted to see what a regular DBA would think of it. What with Christmas and some family issues, I didn’t get too much done. As soon as I hit the first hurdle I kinda caved in and left if for the new year.
Well, January came and went, then I finally got round to looking at it again. I like to think my constant questions and dumb mistakes has helped to prepare Oracle for the sort of thing that will happen when other idiots like me are let loose on it. Anyway, the result of that little journey is documented here.
As I’ve said in the article, things are still in a state of flux and I will no doubt have to do some alterations once the My Oracle Support (MOS) Note 1210656.1 is released that will properly document it.
So as a regular DBA what do I think? I think it is awesome!
Old-style cloning of databases isn’t hard, but it’s boring and can take ages depending on the size of the database and storage being used. It’s one of those tasks that always makes me sigh, before I get off my ass and start it. Clonedb turns that on its head because it is really quick and simple. There is a bit of setup, but that is really going to be a one-time thing on most servers. You are doing your backups anyway, so there is no big deal there. Now you can just run a script and bang, you have a running clone.
I think this is going to please a lot of DBAs out there!
Cheers
Tim…
Nice summary of DNFS. This is one feature I would like to test out.
Dying to get my hands on it, once we get 11gr2 later on this year.
Meanwhile, what I’ve developerd with 10gr2 and SAN-based replication of RMAN backups is no slouch either.
And it is also one script only! 😉