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Olivier_BERNHAR's avatar
Olivier_BERNHAR
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Apr 08, 2013

F5 with non clustered oracle databases, is it supported ?

We have customers connecting to a web server A.

 

The web server is actually made of 2 physical machines A1 & B1 which are load balanced

 

machines A1 & A2 are accessing a single oracle database through jdbc (dbnode1).

 

This database node is not clustered. It's simply using a physical standby database.

 

 

Now this is a platform and we have N of these platforms.

 

What we would like to do is to reduce the number of web servers so that, for example we would have :

 

Webserver A (A1 & B1) connecting to dbnode 1, dbnode 2, dbnode 3 ......

 

Of course this would mean the ability to be able to identify to which database node a sql query must be redirected.

 

As far as we are concerned , the only way for us would be to put a commentary in the SQL statement, identifying the database node we want to connect to and having a proxy SQL receiving these Statements from A1 & B1, being able to trap the comment and establish to connection to the correct database node.

 

Is this something which can be achieved with F5 ?

 

 

Thanks

 

Olivier

 

oracle
partner

2 Replies

  • Holly_W_37599's avatar
    Holly_W_37599
    Historic F5 Account
    Apr 09, 2013
    Hi Olivier,

     

     

    An Oracle database proxy as you've described is on our radar here at F5, especially for the primary use case of directing traffic appropriately to read-only vs. write database nodes. However, in order to peek into the stream and see the SQL, we'll have to reverse engineer Oracle's proprietary SQL*Net software, which is no small undertaking. Hopefully we'll be able to support this requirement someday, but it is not currently available or scheduled for a near-term release.

     

     

    Best regards,

     

    Holly Willey

     

    F5 Product Management Engineer

     

     

    http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/SQL*Net

     

    http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/JDBC

     

  • Chris_Akker_129's avatar
    Chris_Akker_129
    Historic F5 Account
    Jun 12, 2013
    Hi Bernhard, one additional thought. Is it possible to distinguish the target database by looking at the HTTP request ( GET or POST ) ? If so, the F5 could use an iRule to read the HTTP request, something in the URL, a cookie, or an HTTP header, and direct that HTTP request to a specific webserver, which is attached to a specific database ? This is more along the lines of inspecting/controlling traffic at the HTTP layer instead of the DB layer, but it has been done by other customers and is pretty easy with iRules. Just a thought...

     

     

    -Chris.