Chapter 1 – Oracle grid

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the various grid technologies, their origins, and how Oracle is integrated to utilize grid environments. With the release of Oracle 10g, Oracle provides an integrated software infrastructure supporting virtualization, dynamic provisioning, resource pooling, self-adaptive systems, and unified management and is moving toward its strategy of supporting an enterprise grid solution. The software infrastructure includes the three primary tiers of any enterprise solution: Oracle Database Clustering, Oracle Application Server, and Enterprise Manager. A computational grid is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end computational capabilities. The clustering feature in Oracle Database 10g is provided by the Real Application Cluster (RAC) feature. RAC is a composition of multiple (two or more) Oracle instances communicating with a single shared copy of the physical database. Clients connecting to the various instances in the cluster access and share data among instances via the cluster interconnect. Concepts related to computational grids and their evolution are also discussed.