Oracle Real Application Clusters and Industry Trends in Cluster Parallelism and Availability

Shared disk cluster database management systems such as Oracle RAC are being discussed as a potential solution to the application scaling and robustness problem. This paper argues that the best solutions for availability have no single points of failure and support geo-clustering. RAC, with millions of lines of shared software between the DBMS and the disk that offer many single points of failure, is less suitable as an availability solution and is better used as a multinode scale-out solution. This paper focuses on two important attributes of high-scale, data-intensive applications: 1) application availability and 2) affordable performance. The original design point for RAC was multinode scalability and it remains a less-than-ideal choice to address application availability. The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication. Complying with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. Without limiting the rights under copyright, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), or for any purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.