Hi,

My responsibility is to convert an existing enterprise app running on a single server to a clustered setup. I am in the process of identifying the different classes, and issues, and coming up with a design/solution to address each issue.

I find that there are quite some places in the app where config information is stored as xml files and is read from the file, and when config information is changed programatically, they are written back to file on disk.

Now, in a clustered setup, is using files for reading and writing advisable? My initial gut feeling is to transfer the data to a relational database, and read from there. What do most apps do? Is it a good design to read the file from a shared server? What are other options? How are file reads/writes handled?

Abitha.