> Maybe I'm just not devious enough, but I can't figure out what the risks
> are. Can anyone enlighten me?
Security issues include allowing non-privileged users access to
uncontrolled areas of storage. A devious non-privileged user might be
able to execute privileged code or otherwise mess around with data.
Data integrity issues include having the DBA lose control over *where*
data in the database is actually located. If a user decides to configure
some tables under /tmp, the DBA will have no way of knowing and will
have no opportunity to help plan the data storage strategy for his
system.
> Also, why are relative DB paths completely disallowed. I can see that you
> would have to store the location relative to the cluster's path, but I must
> be missing something here too. Thanks for any ideas.
Same reasons as above.
Database designers and administrators tend to be a suspicious and
paranoid lot. If you don't start out that way, losing data the first
time will make you so ;)
hth
- Thomas