Oracle Scalability and Grid Technology

Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

Oracle Scalability and Grid Technology

Most savvy Oracle shops practice the scale up approach first, and then scale out after they reach the maximum capacity of their single server. Due to the advances in server technology, the concept of using a large server has become very popular. The following sections outline an approach used by many forward-thinking Oracle shops:

First Scale Up With SMP Servers

This scale up yields the following benefits:

§ On demand resource allocation by sharing CPU and RAM between many resources.

§ Less maintenance and human resources required to manage fewer servers.

§ Optimal utilization of RAM and CPU resources.

§ High availability through fault tolerant components.

Next Scale Out With Multiple SMP Servers

This subsequent scale out will yield the following additional benefits:

§ High availability through clustering servers with RAC.

§ Optimal utilization of servers.

§ Quicker implementation and easier maintenance with fewer servers.

The scale out approach using RAC and Grid are designed for super large Oracle databases that support many thousands of concurrent users. Unless a system has a need to support more than 10,000 transactions per second, it is likely that the scale up approach will be more than adequate.

Amazon is an excellent example of a scale out Oracle shop. Amazon announced plans to move their 14 trillion byte Oracle database to Oracle RAC on Linux. Amazon uses load-balanced Linux Web servers to horizontally scale its Web presence.

Large-scale RAC database use large servers, each with 32 or 64 processors and over a hundred gigabytes of RAM. As the capacities of the large servers are exceeded, a new server is genned into the RAC cluster. Figure 20.2 is an illustration of large scale RAC databases with these large servers.

Figure 20.2: Large scale RAC databases with super large servers

Large RAC is different!

Large RAC clusters use large SMP servers and do not have the need for dynamic Grid facilities that are used in smaller clustered system with server blades.

The next section will introduce how RAC is used within Oracle10g Grid for high performance database computing.

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