Description OF LOCAL=YES or LOCAL=NO on TNS Connections

Description
-------------------

You see a number of processes on server as follows:

oracleSID(DESCRIPTION=(LOCAL=YES)
or as     
oracleSID(DESCRIPTION=(LOCAL=NO)

How to check?

ps -ef|grep <SID> |wc -l

What do these mean?

Detailed Description:

The LOCAL=YES is more likely to be the User's shadow process connected
to the Database.
While
The LOCAL=NO will be deamons or processes like the Intelligent Agent
connected to the Database.

When you connect as
sqlplus username/password
without specifying a TNS connect string (i.e @prod), you would get
 oracle (DESCRIPTION=(LOCAL=YES)(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp....

If you did specify a TNS connect string, then the processes you would
see would like like this:
 oracle (DESCRIPTION=(LOCAL=NO)(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp....

because you would be connecting through sqlnet and the connection has
to be routed through a listener.

To summarise, every dedicated connection to the database will result
in the creation of an oracle process.Whether or not it is local=YES or
local=NO depends on how you are connecting (SQLNET or not).