Scalability of Replication?

How scalable are the replication features on Oracle 9.2? Is anyone aware of any good studies on this?

I've been asked by a small mortgage/loan company to help them design a solution that will support their growth plans for their customer/loan database system.

They currently have 8 offices. Their IT person thinks they want to run a database server at each office with replication back to a centralized server. This would be updateable materialized views or multi-master replication.

Here's where it gets really difficult:

Their growth plan calls for 100 offices in 5 years, and 850 offices in 10 years. Ignore for the moment all the other issues maintaining 850 servers.

I have my doubts that replication can even scale to this size, but I've never dealt with anything on this scale before, and I'm tempted to walk away from project.

If it were me, I'd be tempted to push for a web based application that's centrally located and sits on a load-balancing cluster of web/app servers. However, I don't have all the details about their app yet to determine if that's realistic - plus that design would have the downside of cutting off the branch offices if they had a network outage.

Can anyone point to any case studies for "distributed" databases on such a scale?

Thanks,

Jeff Received on Sun Feb 06 2005 - 10:10:54 CST