I have a friend who's a database administrator is looking for guidance. He wants to know what the best practices are running anti-virus software on a database server.

The situation he recently found himself into was the IT department installed McAfee on one of his Oracle database servers and he's concerned (feels) there's been a performance hit. Even worse the install had nothing excluded and was scanning all files, etc.

I know that there is some AV software that have database server agents...least I've heard they do. But other than the file system I'm just wondering what the threat is and/or point of installing AV to scan the transactions for example.

Anyone out there have some thoughts, tips, experience with this sort of thing?