Many Oralce Education Instructors have stressed the importance of setting the
ORACLE_HOME variable to an absolute path and not using symbolic links in UNIX.
Can anyone provide updated support for this recommendation to stay away from
symbolic links in Oracle. I need support to prove this to an application
programmer.

Any help will be appreciated!

There are the occasional times when the symbolic link can disappear.
There are, admittedly, few and far between however the possibility
exists and should be considered.  I have never set ORACLE_HOME to any
value except an absolute path, and that is my recommendation; even then
problems can occur as disk drives or arrays may fail, or fail to mount,
thus invalidating the destination.  Keeping this in mind I still
recommend that ORACLE_HOME be an absolute path and not a symbolic
link.  I have had symlinks vanish in the past, for no apparent reason,
leaving no trail to follow.  Oracle instructors can be an opinionated
lot (no offence, Howard) with some of the espoused "rules" being no
more than personal preference.  I will, however, side with the
instructors on this topic.

--
David Fitzjarrell
Oracle Certified DBA

Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/