As open systems continue to replace traditional mainframe systems, system scalability is becoming an increasingly important topic. Although far more flexible than mainframe systems, open systems applications tend to be less reliable and more difficult to scale. There is no cookbook approach to solving this challenge: A thorough understanding of the technologies involved is essential for designing scalable solutions that meet long-term business needs.

Scaling Oracle8i(tm) offers valuable insights and techniques for designing reliable and scalable online transaction processing (OLTP) applications using Oracle. This book focuses on providing the in-depth information about Oracle and the underlying hardware required to build systems that scale effectively.

You will find coverage of relevant hardware and I/O operation; benchmark and database monitoring systems; Oracle internals, operation, and implementation; and UNIX operating system issues that impact Oracle performance and scalability. Essential topics covered include:

* Critical scalability concepts, including latches and locks, lists, hashing, and caching

* A briefing on various hardware architectures, including symmetric multiprocessor, clustered SMP, ccNUMA, and massive parallel processors

* I/O technology, including the physical attributes of I/O systems and RAID technology

* Producing application benchmarks using Oracle trace files

* An introduction to the Tcl-based Oracle scripting tool dbaman, for easy, general purpose database programming (the dbaman source code is included on accompanying CD-ROM)

* Interrogating the Oracle fixed tables to derive operational data

* Oracle Parallel Server

* The inner workings of the UNIX kernel and virtual memory system

* Oracle's Virtual Operating System abstraction interface, including hardware vendor co-engineering

* Writing scalable SQL

* Using TP monitors

* Performance tuning

* Scaling large Oracle applications

In addition, a real-life case study of a large-scale Oracle system illustrates concepts, approaches, and experienced-based pointers for implementation. Scaling Oracle8i(tm) concludes with a look at Oracle's future, including its role in the emerging field of Internet OLTP development.