General Design Considerations for Oracle RAC

This section briefly describes database design and deployment techniques for Oracle RAC environments. It also describes considerations for high availability and provides general guidelines for various Oracle RAC deployments.

Consider performing the following steps during the design and development of applications that you are deploying on an Oracle RAC database:

  1. Tune the design and the application

  2. Tune the memory and I/O

  3. Tune contention

  4. Tune the operating system

Note:

If an application does not scale on an SMP system, then moving the application to an Oracle RAC database cannot improve performance.

Consider using hash partitioning for insert-intensive online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. Hash partitioning:

  • Reduces contention on concurrent inserts into a single database structure

  • Affects sequence-based indexes when indexes are locally partitioned with a table and tables are partitioned on sequence-based keys

  • Is transparent to the application

If you use hash partitioning for tables and indexes for OLTP environments, then you can greatly improve performance in your Oracle RAC database. Note that you cannot use index range scans on an index with hash partitioning.