Simplify Managing TNSNAMES.ORA
One of the popular questions from OOW was how to deal with large number of databases and how to manage client connection information that is stored in TNSNAMES.ORA without actually maintaining individual TNSNAMES.ORA files. So I thought I would answer it here as well.
As you probably know TNSNAMES.ORA is the file the database client uses to translate things like:
sqlplus hr@ORCL
into an actual database connection (which means things like knowing what hostname and port to connect to).
In 9i the database added a feature to lookup this information via a proprietary service called the Names Service (though I think OID was also an option). This was deprecated in 10g so that it could be managed via LDAP. And by LDAP that meant OID though you could use Active Directory if you met a proper set of conditions (covered in the docs but I will likely cover it here in the future as well).
10g docs can be found here.
11g docs can be found here.
