Oracle Net8 Configuration and Troubleshooting

Domains and Regions

In a large organization, you may be interested in setting up Oracle Names in a hierarchical manner. This allows you to offload responsibility for maintaining net service names to various subunits of your organization. In Oracle Names’ terminology, the term region is used to refer to a subunit, and each region corresponds to a different domain. The term region implies a geographical scope, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Figure 7.19 illustrates an arrangement with two regions: one for the research arm of an organization, and one for the manufacturing arm.

Figure 7-19. An Oracle Names environment with two regions

The arrangement shown in Figure 7.19 allows the research arm to manage its net service names independently of the manufacturing arm. Unqualified net service names need to be unique only within a region. On a global basis, names defined in a region inherit the domain assigned to the region, and on that basis are unique across the organization. The research region’s domain is rese.gennick.org, while the manufacturing region’s domain is manu.gennick.org.

To provide further autonomy for the research and manufacturing regions, each uses a separate database as a repository. If the two regions are separated geographically, this also speeds access. Clients in the manufacturing arm of the organization usually use net service names defined in that region, and ...