Re: RAC versus simplistic load-balancing of replicated databases

On 3 Jun 2003 12:32:25 -0700, murphy_at_genome.chop.edu (Kevin Murphy) wrote:

>Thanks in advance for any advice about an Oracle architecture question
>that will help my research lab at UPenn flesh out a grant application.
>
>For a read-only database-backed website where the data changes en
>masse once every couple months, the pages are pretty
>database-intensive, most of the application logic is in stored
>procedures, a small amount in dynamic pages, and the database is 2-5GB
>in size, ...
>
>Q1) would scalability best be achieved by:
>
>A. Real Application Clustering, or
>B. Some sort of load balancing across multiple machines each running
>an independent copy of the database?
>

Why not just get one big db server and tune your queries? 2-5GB in size should easily be handled by a 4CPU machine, even in heavy usage.

>
>Q2) What would be the best means of doing the replication in Q1.B
>above?

You could probably use standby database option

>Q3) Regarding "some sort of load balancing", what are the options?
>Are there load balancers that can direct traffic based on CPU or IO
>loads? Or is round-robbin load balancing more practical?

There are load balancers (e.g. Alteon) that use various algorithms to do load balancing.

>Q4) In general would you run the webserver instances on the database
>machines, or have the webservers run on separate machines?

Webserver separate, u don't want to take cpu cycles form oracle

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We use Oracle 8.1.7.4 on Solaris 2.7 boxes remove NSPAM to email Received on Tue Jun 03 2003 - 15:49:40 CDT