For connecting to Oracle using the SQL*Plus terminal, Oracle's tnsnames.ora file lets you specify multiple IP addresses that you can connect to (in case one of the machines hosting the database is down--yes, we're setting up a grid in Oracle 10g). However, in our
Java web app, we're using the pure Java thin client driver and the only thing I know how to do in the connection
string is specify the IP address or host name for one machine. How can we tell it something more generic so that it will know where the whole grid is? If we can't tell it something like that, then a given application server (running
Tomcat) will be hardcoded to one database machine, so if that machine goes down, we'd have to restart Tomcat on that server after making the change in the eonnection string in our config file.