Professor
Mr. Louis Voit
Semester
Spring 2007
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Oracle RAC, a database management system (DBMS), offers solutions that are superior to comparable products by other suppliers including Microsoft's SQL server and IBM's DB2 UDB. The primary features of the Oracle RAC are its availability and scalability. Improvements made to Oracle RAC databases since the Oracle 9i RAC have resulted in the development of the Oracle9i Release 2 RAC and the Oracle RAC Database 10g. These systems offer a considerable amount of reliability in most customer deployments. These systems make it easier to manage a larger number of nodes as they are easy to set up, install and manage. With Oracle RAC customers are also able to cluster several small low cost servers instead of using one large more expensive symmetric multiprocessing server. There are two primary limitations of Oracle RAC. Customer's servers must be identical, as well as the operating systems and patch levels and Oracle RAC is not adaptable outside the confines of a data center as it can only be used with shared hard disk storage that have a limit on how far away nodes can be located. |
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The article is a bit vague as to how Oracle RAC is superior to the other systems, not providing any statistically sound proof to justify the position. Some serious test into the comparative scalability and availability of Oracle and its competitors needs to be undertaken first. I believe, however, that it does offer some insight into effective database management solutions. Database managers, depending on their business requirements, would find this information useful but the new Oracle systems seem more relevant to larger and more global businesses. |
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