A few weeks ago Tim Hall (the oracle-base guy) came up with the idea to have an appreciation day for OTN. As I’m in western Canada, I’m probably in one of the latest timezones, so before I published this post I managed to see other people’s posts (and there are a lot). It’s great to see such an initiative being so successful.
As you can see from the title, the feature I chose is Real Application Cluster (RAC). I picked this one as I think this is one of the most complex and impressive features of Oracle database (and also relatively unique in the database world). With RAC, Oracle did a real active-active cluster, with all the crazy mechanisms it has to include to actually work. Oracle introduced it in 9i (but we all know that 10g was the first real proper version for RAC). Here is a short list of some of the great components/mechanisms that make RAC the way it is:
- Server side load balancing (based on the listener and dynamic registration)
- Services
- Global cache
- Global enqueue
- Resource mastering
- ASM (not exactly RAC but definitely related and a great feature by itself)
- Transparent Application Failover
- Fast Application Notification
- Callouts
- And more…
So all in all, I think that RAC is my choice for this day, as this feature is really something to appreciate, and it continues to grow and become even more powerful with every new version that comes out.
Thank you Oracle, thank you OTN and thanks Tim!
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