Re: Oracle RAC newbie

On Tue, 08 Aug 2006 06:25:19 +0100, Jonathan Lewis wrote:

> Once you've got the instances up and running for about 15 minutes,
> the rest of RAC is trivial - but getting the thing installed and working
> to start with can be a major pain. And make sure you've had some
> experience in the 'just add another node' bit that is one of the "selling
> points" of RAC for small businesses BEFORE you go live.

It's usually a good practice to ask for references and check them. Oracle sales person will probably be able to compile the list of similar configuration in your general area. If he can't - don't buy, you definitely do not want to be one and only owner of that unique configuration within a 100 miles radius. Also, when installing RAC, it is a good practice to use services of the professional consulting companies, like GridApp or Polyserve. I believe that Oracle may generate a backlash and a bad rap with the "just add water and stir" method of selling RAC. Remember the "unbreakable" marketing campaign? The "unbreakable" buzzword quickly became a joke. That may happen to RAC, if too many people get too serious about running RAC on a bunch of Linux PC boxes and start expecting them to perform like mainframes. In addition to that, I will never understand why people are buying by the number of declared MHZ and quantity of RAM, not trying to discern how many I/O operations per second will the new configuration be able to perform. I've seen very few databases to run out of CPU resources. Waiting for scattered db file read is a little bit more frequent then having a bunch of runnable processes competing for CPU.

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