Forum Discussion

BaltoStar_12467's avatar
BaltoStar_12467
Aug 16, 2014

Thanks for the response Kevin.

Please note that I am on BIG-IP v11. The data-group mechanisms you describe I believe apply to pre-v11.

New to v11, the operation 

LocalLBDataGroupFile.set_local_path()
immediately reloads & recaches an external data-group with the contents of the supplied data-file -- there's no need to trigger BIG-IP to reload its config.

It is not recommended to directly update the local data-files BIG-IP self-maintains for each external data-group ( if you could even locate the file currently being used ). On create/update of an external data-group, BIG-IP auto-creates a new persistent data-file stored in a special directory. This data-file's name is constructed as the data-group name appended with a unique identifier and revision index to track history of changes.

My concerns are that on reload/recache of very large data-sets ( 1M+ rows ) something goes wrong and the data-group becomes unavailable to those iRules that reference it.