Re: oracle grid

hjr_at_dizwell.com (Howard J. Rogers) wrote in message news:<14a1f766.0409192230.178cf042_at_posting.google.com>...
> Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:<1095614851.629349_at_yasure>...
> > Noons wrote:
> >
> > > Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:<1095458876.315376_at_yasure>...
> > >
> > >>There is no relationship in the Oracle world between RAC and GRID. You
> > >>can have RAC without GRID, GRID without RAC, both or neither.
> > >
> > >
> > > I wonder then why Oracle includes RAC as part of their grid
> > > infrastructure?
> >
> > Because Oracle's sales and marketing team has either:
> >
> > A. A very confused idea of what they are selling
> > or
> > B. A very confused message creating end-user confusion
> > or
> > C. Both
>
> I'm going to simultaneously agree and disagree with you Daniel!
>
> You *can't* have a Grid without a RAC (so Noons is right). For the
> simple reason that, without RAC, as an end-user, I would know what
> server I was connected to (ie, I would *have* to know), whereas the
> essence of Grid-ness is neither to know nor care. And for that, I need
> a choice of instances running on a plethora of servers.

End users don't *have* to know. I have middleware that hides it from them. So, for example, if Mr. DSS-guy has to try every whichwaything with his data, I can put a replicant on his pc (or if he complains about performance, let him buy another pc/server) and let that take the hit, rather than the oltp system. Perfectly doable with O8 vintage middleware.

Now, if you are calling administrators end-users, I would be very distressed. And I think Oracle is trying to do this with grid, and it is not a good thing.  

>
> Pursuing the grid industry's favourite analogy: if there was only one
> power station in the country, and a cable running directly from it to
> your house, that wouldn't be a power grid. For a power grid, you need
> lots of power stations and lots of cables so that you don't know where
> the electron you just consumed was actually generated.

And this is where it breaks down: the power industry is fighting against it, but the next big thing is to distribute power generation to the end users. So rather than plugging into the wall and praying a lot, the end-users can determine on their own whether they will generate it locally, or even generate extra and sell it into the grid.  Unfortunately, the economics of this are in flux, and like the original power grid building, requires government subsidies of one form or another (in the US, periodic tax breaks for homeowners seem to be working to bring the economies of scale to the manufacture of the small scale devices - wind turbines, solar cells and fuel cells of various sorts are ramping up).

But in the computing world, the PC's are already on the end-users desks! (Sometimes more than 1...) So it is backwards to try to force RAC on a bunch of new servers to get to gridness. But if that's what sells, so be it.

>
> But you are right too, because there is actually no such thing as "the
> Grid", just degrees of grid-ness. So, yes, I *could* indeed have a
> grid without RAC: it's just that it wouldn't be a very griddy grid. On
> a spectrum of transparency and ubiquity, a RAC-less grid is neither
> very transparent nor particularly ubiquitous.
>
> Hence Oracle doesn't say you *have* to have RAC for a Grid (at least,
> I hope not!), merely that RAC is a core grid technology.
>
> It's called having your cake and eating a hearty breakfast, too.

Jeez, sounds like all those places with birthdays and cow-orkers leaving and new cow-orkers coming and... chocolate cake again?

jg

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