[Samba] Re: SAMBA & ISAM Databases

[Simon Hobson]

David Collier-Brown wrote:
>>On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 18:23, Pepe Guimarães wrote:
>>>I have a heterogeneous network with a R.H. Linux server running Samba
>>>3.0.5 and various
>>>Win clients (from Win 98 to Win XP Pro). On a Samba share I have an ISAM
>>>database (Access, FoxPro etc. like)
>>>that is being accessed by applications running on the Win clients and by
>>>applications running in Linux.
>
>   Alas, this is generally a bad idea.  One shouldn't share the
>filesystems underneath databases and try to make the filesystem
>locking do the work that a database normally does.
>
>   Instead, run the database with its disks directly connected,
>and mounted (usually) raw, so as to be under the database's control.
>This allows the client to send just the query to the machine with
>the DBMS, and get back just the results. let the DBMS worry about
>locking, query optimization and caching/flushing.  It's going
>to be far better at it than a filesystem.

That would be fine if the database was a 
client-server system. As it is, the type of 
database being discussed does not do this, all 
the clients simply 'dip into the files' 
themselves and so all clients need read-write 
access and somehow between them they manage the 
record locking.

You'd be surprised how many, even quite big, 
systems still use this type of access method.

Simon

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Simon Hobson MA MIEE, Technology Specialist
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