Re: Oracle Grid

Someone pointed out this thread to me in an email, and (as you know) I wouldn't normally respond here. But this statement needed rebutting....

DA Morgan wrote:
> Joel Garry wrote:
> >
> > Mark A wrote:
> >
> >>I just saw a TV advertisement for Oracle Grid on a cable news channel. It is
> >>be marketed as continuous availability solution. How does this differ from
> >>RAC?
[snip]

> > Best answer I've seen:
> > http://www.dizwell.com/html/what_is_the_grid_.html

[snip]

> Howard is mostly right but he is also incorrect.
>
> Grid, in the Oracle context, currently refers to the Grid Control which
> is sort of a super-OEM in 10gR1. This is, however, just the first step
> in a technology that will be enhanced with future roll-outs.

I won't bother to point out the obvious fact that this particular answer doesn't actually agree with the answer you gave the original poster earlier in the thread, where Grid meant "repurposing and instrumentation of Oracle instances and servers", or some such phrase.

But I will point out that this is one of the sillier statements you've made. "Grid", in an Oracle context, is right there in the product name: it's what the "g" in "10g" stands for, after all. And I think it rather daring of you to imagine that Oracle Corporation would name their flagship product after nothing much more than a web-based database administration tool.

In fact, the Grid Control -as its very name tells you- is something that will, er, *control* grids. So the Grid Control isn't *itself* a grid, but merely something which *manages* them, whatever they are.

Mark has already given the answer. (And, incidentally, so do I in the article you think partly incorrect). A grid is what you get when you take RAC, ASSM, ASM, ASMM, Data Pump and a bunch of other technologies and throw them all together in the same server room. The RAC component means you don't know (or care) what instance you've connected to or which instance is processing your parallelised query. ASSM is a core space management technology that means you don't get unbalanced freelist groups when you run on a RAC -in other words, you can stop worrying about the storage consequences of running on a RAC. ASM means you don't know, or care, where your data physically resides: it's in "that storage pool", somewhere. ASMM means the SGA self-tunes and self-manages itself. Data Pump means exports identify their endianness and platform, so it ceases to matter very much what hardware you decide to run Oracle on: data can pass seamlessly -*transparently*- (sort of) between platforms.

And so on and on: there is no product called "Grid". It's a mindset. An aspiration. It's characterised by transparency, self-management, and virtualisation. All those technologies (and a whole bunch more) mean you don't know where your data is, where it's being processed, or how the database internals (storage, space management etc) are handled. But the point is that you don't need to know, nor need you care: you see Scott's Employees table scrolling up your screen. That's all you need to worry about.

All of which means that saying it is simply 'Grid Control' is just a tad of an understatement!!

> It is important to remember that the various vendors have yet to create
> a final standard to which they will comply with respect to Grid. So the
> final look, feel, and capabilities, are yet to be defined. Sort of like
> Blades.

Grid is concept or a paradigm, not a standard. Not even a yet-to-be-ratified standard.

So it's not just Grid Control. And it's not "repurposing and instrumentation of Oracle instances and servers", either. Whatever that is meant to mean. It's a collection of technologies that aims to make database processing power transparently available to users, repsonsively, automatically and with the minimum of fuss.

HJR Received on Thu Jun 16 2005 - 03:05:55 CDT