Is Appfabric w/o SQLServer as configuration repository a bad idea?

Question

I am very interested in the replacment ASP.NET Session Manager portion of Appfabric, and somewhat interested in the distributed cache manager. We don't have a need for its hosting features. While we do have a clustered SQLServer inhouse, adding that as a dependency for our aspnet/oracle application probably would not be well received.

There is a network based XML file option that the appfabric videos suggest is okay for small deployments, which we would be (one 2-node farn, one 5-node farm).

So are there any success stories w/o SQLServer on the backend? Would a DFS network share prove reliable enough for Appfabric instead of SQLServer?

Answer 1

I think this is precisely the situation where the AppFabric team intended the XML provider to be used i.e. where SQL Server is not available/not desired. I doubt that there are any case studies available yet where this has been done, purely because AppFabric is so new that they haven't been written yet. However I don't believe there are any quirks to using the XML provider over the SQL provider - all I can suggest is try it and see! You could always switch over to SQL Server at a later date if the XML provider proves problematic. Or if you're felling brave, you should be able to write an Oracle provider (though the documentation on this seems, um, sketchy).