Mirrored Server for real-time computations?

I'm on a project that's implementing a bond trading system: .Net front end, Oracle back end.

A problem has arisen that began with reporting. Many of the reports are based on something the bond traders call "Quality" ratings. There's also something called "Baskets". Holdings of various securities are processed against various characteristics of securities and their underlying credit support.

Briefly, computing all this is quite intensive, the data behind the computations can change from minute-to-minute, and the results are critical.

For the reporting, they've decided to create tables to receive the computations. Run the computations once, then fire off a batch of 50 or so reports that uses same.

However something else has now arisin: the idea of presenting that information real-time in a sort of dashboard presentation. For this, we'd have to re-compute the valuse very often - maybe every few minutes.....and the guys who know Oracle say this would bring the application to it's knees.

Unencumbered as I am by any reall knowledge of Oracle, it occurs to me that one solution would be mirroring the DB's tables to another server/processor and having that computer's sole mission in life to be continually computing and re-computing those values and constantly refreshing the tables containing same.

Does this make sense to anybody?

Alternatives?

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PeteCresswell