Oracle Real Application Clusters

In this chapter we looked at the instance and database tuning of a single instance. In spite of the database being configured for RAC, only one instance is up during this tuning process. This part of the tuning phase is very critical, because if all instances are tuned at the same time it would be difficult to analyze whether the problems arising are from the instance level or because of the added cluster tier of the database. This phase of the tuning process will determine if the clustered tuning will help in any respect, because if scalability is difficult on a single instance database configuration, or if the single instance database is I/O bound, the scalability factor that is expected from the RAC implementation may be even more difficult to achieve.

Single stand-alone configuration has many areas that need to be visited for configuration and tuning, like the application tier, the instance tier, and the database tier. In a more busy application, the network tier is also something that needs to be considered during this tuning phase.

In the next chapter, we will discuss tuning the clustered database configuration. The discussions will be with respect to the same areas like the application, instance, and the database; however, we will be looking at it from a different perspective, namely a clustered configuration.