Oracle RAC and Grid Q&A With The Experts

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

Q&A about RAC and Grid with the RAC Experts

I recently got the opportunity to sit down and talk to two RAC gurus and learn what RAC is and how it relates to Oracle's Grid technology. Listen to the discussion with Philip Newland and Scott Jesse, both from Oracle Corp. Philip is a technical manager with Oracle's RAC Pack team and Scott is an Oracle Support Services Manager for the RAC Assurance Team. Scott is also the co-author of two Oracle Press books, "Oracle9i for Windows 2000 Tips & Techniques" and "Oracle Database 10g High Availability with RAC, Flashback & DataGuard".

There were plenty of questions asked and answered. Here are five important questions. Listen to the podcast to hear the rest.

What does Oracle mean by Grid?

An Oracle Grid allows you to add computing capacity, CPUs or storage, on demand as needed without pre-purchasing monolithic hardware. On an Oracle Grid, you can add capacity one cheap PC at a time.

There is no product for sale called Oracle Grid. You can't just walk into a store and buy a grid. Oracle Grid is a technology composed of several innovative Oracle products.

What components make up an Oracle Grid?

RAC

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) allows Oracle customers to add database capacity (by adding servers) to an existing cluster. RAC allows a database to be spread across multiple servers. You can dynamically add and remove nodes (servers) as required.

RAC allows an application to transparently scale, add performance and be available 24/7. RAC can be very affordable to scale because it allows you to add cheap servers when you need them.

ASM

Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) eases storage management by abstracting file systems to where DBAs need them. ASM also allows consolidation of storage so that applications that need storage have it available when they need it.

Clusterware

Oracle Clusterware provides the intelligence for a cluster. A cluster is a series of servers acting as a single entity. Clusterware provides the management and monitoring of a cluster.

Oracle Clusterware is not limited to providing scalability and high availability for Oracle Databases. With Oracle Clusterware, you can provide these services for third-party databases, application servers and pretty much any other kind of application.

Cluster File System

Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS & ACFS2) allows an Oracle database cluster to share disk across many servers. OCFS ensures that Oracle sees a consistent image of the disks on each server.

Does RAC work with Oracle Standard Edition?

Oracle Standard Edition, the edition of Oracle for the SMB market, comes with a license for a 4 node RAC cluster. A standard edition license allows up to 4 CPU sockets in a cluster. Those 4 sockets may be in a single server or in two, three or four servers. As long as your cluster does not exceed 4 sockets, RAC is included as part of your Standard Edition License.

Standard Edition does not limit the size of your database in anyway so as long as the processing power for a four socket configuration suits your needs, this can be a great way to save. If you need to scale to a larger cluster, Standard Edition can easily be upgraded to Enterprise Edition allowing you up to 1000 nodes.

Standard Edition RAC configurations are required to use ASM. Because ASM saves time and effort, this is not really a limitation but more of a method for Oracle to help you ensure your success.

How do I monitor my Grid?

Oracle provides both DB Control and Grid Control for monitoring and managing your databases. DB control is a web based tool that allows you to manage one database at a time. Oracle Grid Control allows you to manage entire grids and is an add on package. Grid Control can simplify all of your grid management tasks.

Can I mix and match hardware?

Yes. Oracle expects that vendors are improving hardware constantly and that customers will need to upgrade hardware over time. Rather than force customers to maintain a single vendor or configuration, Oracle RAC will work across various hardware configurations. While one server may be a single CPU and 4GB of RAM, another server in the same cluster can be 4 CPUs (with dual cores) and 16GB of RAM.

The only requirement is that the Operating Systems must match: Windows to Windows, Linux to Linux, 32 bit to 32 bit, etc.

Summary

Grid Computing - Oracle allows you to scale by tying together cheap hardware in a cluster allowing multiple servers to act as one. Oracle provides the software that enables database grids (via RAC) as well as storage grids (via ASM and OCFS). Oracle's Grid allows a business to start as large or small as they need, spending money on hardware and other system resources only when it is actually needed. RAC and Grid is transparent to the application allowing painless and immediate scaling when required.

I think this is one of my better podcasts. Check it out.

LewisC

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In2M Moves From Open Source database to Oracle

In2M is a company who makes an online financial productivity and personal spending management system, including MVelopes Personal which won the prestigious 2006 PC World World Class award and was selected as one of the Top 100 Best Products of 2006.

In2M recently switched from an open source database (I'm not sure which) to Oracle Standard Edition. Oracle Standard is the lower tier database (i.e. cheaper) that does not offer additional features such as partitioning or OLAP processing. Notably though, Standard Edition comes with RAC as part of it's feature set and does not require additional licensing for it. You are limited in the number of nodes you can cluster though.

"The possibilities in Real Application Clusters were another big reason for us choosing Oracle," said Law. "Right now we're running a proof-of-concept, merging databases under Real Application Clusters, to check out the architecture before moving forward. We believe that Real Application Clusters makes Oracle Database Standard Edition powerful enough to support us for the next four years, even given our high growth rate, the critical need for high-availability and high performance for our customers."

What makes this announcement particularly significant is that the company heavily uses open source in it's offering.

"We use Linux and open source platforms because it's cost effective," said Jason Law, Vice President of IT and Systems R & D for In2M. "But we were not comfortable with an open source database product for delivering high-availability software as a service. Oracle Database Standard Edition gives us the reliability we need now, and will scale to meet our future needs for some time to come, even despite our aggressive growth plans. Our target is 99.99 percent availability, and Oracle has not failed us since we started using it."

The migrated application is currently online with 50,000 users and it is expected to grow another 100,000 in the next year. In2M found it quite straightforward to migrate the product's original open source databases to Oracle. And its next product, Mvelopes Business - currently in early testing and expected to be available later this year - will be rolled out from scratch on Oracle Database Standard Edition.

Also notable is that the user interface for the MVelopes Personal application is written in Open Source Adobe Flex. That makes the application completely browser based. The application offers security via SSL.

Features of the application include Transaction History, Online Bill Payment, Net Worth Tracking, and Mobile Access (cell phones).

oracle open source flex database RAC linux