Load Balancing and Scalability (ora7 or ora8)

A potential client recently described as "unscalable" our two-tier architecture, in which business rules were implemented in Oracle via insert and update triggers.

They expect a very large number of concurrent users (500-1000) in an insert-intensive operation, against large tables. Each insert-transaction will consist of a header record with hundreds of related detail records, with simple money-arithmetic calculations performed by stored procedures.

What load-balancing options are there in Oracle? Can a single stored-procedure be somehow farmed out for execution by multiple compute engines, with which server does what based on a user or role? And is it possible to distribute a single table over multiple servers in Oracle 7 or 8, thereby distributing the disk i/o?

TIA
Tim Received on Thu Apr 02 1998 - 00:00:00 CST