> It depends on what exactly you have in mind. If you want to run several
> "dedicated applications" as oppose to a single "all-purpose application",
> each of the "dedicated" ones will need to know what schema to use and
> what TNS alias to use to connect to what instance.
>
> Another question of course is why. What is the business or technical
> requirements behind the decision to partition the data and/or
> application? Are the complexities and costs the that goes with Oracle
> Parallel Server and the associated justified? If it is for example a
> performance issue, can this not be better solved by a hardware upgrade or
> using a better and more scalable hardware platform? Maybe the application
> can no longer handle the volume and it is the bottleneck. A change in the
> database server architecture may thus only be a temporary fix as the
> application design/architecture needs changing.
Thanks for your comments. The answer to why is scalability. Leaving
aside redundancy and fail-over, what my customers want is the ability to
add hardware to existing systems over time. Today they have a few
thousand users with minimal transactions. In the near future
transactions may become hundreds of thousands per day. The application
of which I speak runs on very scalable systems, but isn't quite up to
par on its own scalability. Hopefully this is addressed in near future
releases, but meanwhile, I am looking for solutions to scale the systems
upon which we run. I don't want to *upgrade* hardware, but to *add*
hardware. The solutions above seem to require that all designing and
planning for future requirements be done up front. My customers would
rather start with an E450 and add another one if necessary, than start
with an E4500. Are the complexities and costs justified. You betcha!
Received on Mon Feb 08 1999 - 14:51:39 CST
