Biggest issue with CIFS and database is stateful nature of the CIFS protocol and "robustness" (is that a word?) of the re-director on Windows.

What this means is that if the re-director gets overwhelmed (can happen, but you may never see it) the CIFS connection will be lost then re-established, but the Oracle Service will crash. Usually not a big problem, but you do need to manually re-start it.

Also, be aware that when using UNC pathnames or drive letter access to CIFS shares with Oracle (the former is the best way to go) the Oracle Services must be set to run as a domain user, not a local machine account. So this complicates the process of creating new databases since the service will be started, but must be stopped and modified to use a different log in - one that has domain access to the Filer shares and has the "Run as a service" priviledge. This usually means that you cannot use the Oracle database assistant to create the databases directly. You can use the database assistant to create the scripts to create the databases, but you must create the service, make the mods to the service, then create the database (using the scripts created by the database assistant).

has any one experiences with running oracle on a Windows Server on CIFS? You don't find many documents about it on the Netapps Site. All the whitepapers concerning Windows and Oracle are about SAN.

What are the pros / cons and limitations of running Oracle on a CIFS Share?