Re: Oracle Standard Edition & RAC

At 05:44 PM 1/4/2007, Alex Gorbachev wrote:
>A single node 4 CPU SE should scale even better than 2 node x 2 CPU SE
>RAC so using SE RAC for scalability is luxury and company doing so has
>way too much money.

Am I missing something here? The Oracle licensing cost should be the same and 2 dual-cpu boxes should be cheaper than a quad. That's what RAC is for me: a beancounter's scalability solution.

>Availability? Well, besides Oracle licensing, HA environment requires
>fair amount of investment if it's really HA and not just "reported" HA
>because of RAC.
>
>If company with HA requirements can't justify cost of EE and RAC
>option in addition to the infrastructure behind then they really have
>to think about changing their business model and/or IT architecture.

I just can't buy the RAC HA argument. The only outage RAC protects you from is a server failure, not database failures due to human error or software bugs. And the probability of that (server failure) is probably only increased by running RAC with all its complexity. Quoting from a list of "unpleasant truths" published by Edsger Dijkstra in 1975! (from a recent post on the Oaktable network): Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

Of course the beancounter's scalability solution provides a self-fulfilling prophesy in itself - those cheap pizza boxes used to make RAC solutions economical are more likely to fail than an expensive multi-cpu server. Sometimes you DO get what you pay for.

Regards

Wolfgang Breitling
Centrex Consulting Corporation
www.centrexcc.com

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