Oracle 11g Benefits of Real Application Clusters (RAC)
Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

Benefits of Real Application Clusters (RAC)

The benefits of Real Application Clusters:

• Ability to spread CPU load across multiple servers

• Continuous Availability / High Availability (HA)

- Protection from single instance failures

- Protection from single server failures

• RAC can take advantage of larger SGA sizes than can be accommodated by a single instance commodity server

• Scalability

There are cases where RAC may not be an appropriate option:

• If RAC is being used as a cost savings solution, be sure to analyze both hardware and software costs

• Do not expect RAC to scale if the application will not scale on SMP

• Be realistic about the latency difference between local only memory-cache instance communication and inter-node network based multi-instance Cache Fusion communication

RAC is not always the best option

Solutions such as RAC are not always the best option.  If high performance is the only requirement and the single server can consistently deliver the necessary power needed, then a single instance server may be the best choice.  If High Availability (HA) is the only requirement, and less complex solutions such as Data Guard are adequate, then Data Guard without RAC might be the best choice.

RAC Evolution

Evolution from OPS

The biggest performance robber in the OPS architecture was the DB block ping. A DB block ping would occur when an instance participating in an OPS database had a block in its cache required by another participating instance. In OPS, if another instance required the block in the cache of a second instance, the block would have to be written out to disk, the locks transferred, and then the block re-read into the requesting instance.

 

Oracle 8i OPS implementation brought in many significant changes. The significant new feature was the introduction of cache fusion technology. Cache fusion, as examined earlier, is a concept where cache, or SGA, from the multiple instances coordinates the buffers and manages the database access.

 

Oracle 8i (OPS) introduced the initial phase of cache fusion. The data blocks were transferred from the SGA of one instance to the SGA of another instance without the need to write the blocks to disk. This was aimed at reducing the ping overhead of data blocks. However, the partial implementation of cache fusion in Oracle 8i could help only in certain conditions.