Scaling Oracle8i™: Building Highly Scalable OLTP System Architectures - Softcover

Morle, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201325748 ISBN 13: 9780201325744

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 1999

Synopsis

This is the complete, expert guide to building enterprise-class UNIX-based Oracle OLTP systems that deliver maximum performance and scalability. In Scaling Oracle 8i, one of the world's leading Oracle consultants introduces today's best methods and technologies for building industrial-strength Oracle database systems on UNIX platforms. Understand exactly what scalability means in the enterprise; then discover how to deliver it, step-by-step, from the ground up, through design, testing, construction, maintenance, benchmarking, and ongoing management. Morle covers every component that impacts performance, including hashing, caching, hardware architecture and I/O subsystems, Oracle database objects, data storage, memory structures, and a detailed review of the Oracle Parallel Server. Readers will find comprehensive coverage of tuning the underlying UNIX platform to improve OLTP response times; including co-engineering the kernel; working with virtual memory, I/O, interprocess communication; and more. Scaling Oracle 8i contains a full chapter on the special issues associated with e-commerce, as well as a detailed case study drawn from one of the world's largest car rental reservations systems. For all enterprise system architects, database engineers, and application developers working with Oracle.

About this title

About the Author

James Morle runs a specialist consulting company, Scale Abilities, that specializes in solving complex technical and architectural problems for leading companies. He has built a number of the world's largest and most challenging systems, including one of the first large Oracle Parallel Server systems. Specializing in high-performance scalable systems, his background is in Oracle and UNIX internals. He can be contacted directly at James.Morle@Scaleabilities.co.uk.

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From the Back Cover

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™ 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
• 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™ concludes with a look at Oracle's future, including its role in the emerging field of Internet OLTP development.

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From the Inside Flap

This is a book about getting the most out of Oracle8i on UNIX systems. While many people understand how to administrate Oracle and UNIX, far fewer understand the issues and workings of the software and hardware, thus limiting the scalability of the system. This book aims to open up this essential information, enabling the reader to build faster, larger, and more scalable systems than ever before.

The purpose of this book is to provide grounding in all the areas required for large systems implementation using UNIX and Oracle8i. Some of the information in this text is available elsewhere, scattered throughout a large number of specialized volumes, while other information, taken from experience in implementing such systems, is previously undocumented.

Unlike many Oracle books, this book avoids the "one size fits all," cookbook approach to improving the skillset of the reader. In my opinion, such books do little to improve foundation skills and serve only to confuse readers when their circumstances deviate from those of the author. Rather, the intent of this book is to communicate a distillation of many years of experience in building very large Oracle database systems. The information presented here allows the reader to make informed decisions, based on real facts, that directly apply to the actual case at hand.

Where appropriate, this book will make recommendations to the reader, mostly from an approach standpoint. These recommendations are intended to guide the reader past some of the common pitfalls often encountered during the building of large systems. In addition to technical information, the book also makes organizational and procedural recommendations intended to help the reader avoid dead ends and other sources of aggravation.

Although the focus of this book is on Oracle8i, the principles presented also apply to other database software. UNIX is the premier platform for very large Oracle systems and is therefore presented as the underlying operating system, although many of the hardware and theoretical discussions also apply to other operating systems, such as Windows NT. Large, custom-written applications are the main target of this book, but all of the concepts presented here also apply in varying degrees to smaller systems and packaged applications.

Who Should Read This Book
This book is primarily aimed at the following audiences.

System architects Database engineers wanting to expand their knowledge System administrators working on UNIX/Oracle systems Senior application developers In addition, this book will be of value to the following audiences.

Technology managers Computer science students

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

This is a book about getting the most out of Oracle8i on UNIX systems. While many people understand how to administrate Oracle and UNIX, far fewer understand the issues and workings of the software and hardware, thus limiting the scalability of the system. This book aims to open up this essential information, enabling the reader to build faster, larger, and more scalable systems than ever before. The purpose of this book is to provide grounding in all the areas required for large systems implementation using UNIX and Oracle8i. Some of the information in this text is available elsewhere, scattered throughout a large number of specialized volumes, while other information, taken from experience in implementing such systems, is previously undocumented. Unlike many Oracle books, this book avoids the "one size fits all," cookbook approach to improving the skillset of the reader. In my opinion, such books do little to improve foundation skills and serve only to confuse readers when their circumstances deviate from those of the author. Rather, the intent of this book is to communicate a distillation of many years of experience in building very large Oracle database systems. The information presented here allows the reader to make informed decisions, based on real facts, that directly apply to the actual case at hand. Where appropriate, this book will make recommendations to the reader, mostly from an approach standpoint. These recommendations are intended to guide the reader past some of the common pitfalls often encountered during the building of large systems. In addition to technical information, the book also makes organizational and procedural recommendations intended to help the reader avoid dead ends and other sources of aggravation. Although the focus of this book is on Oracle8i, the principles presented also apply to other database software. UNIX is the premier platform for very large Oracle systems and is therefore presented as the underlying operating system, although many of the hardware and theoretical discussions also apply to other operating systems, such as Windows NT. Large, custom-written applications are the main target of this book, but all of the concepts presented here also apply in varying degrees to smaller systems and packaged applications. Who Should Read This Book This book is primarily aimed at the following audiences. * System architects * Database engineers wanting to expand their knowledge * System administrators working on UNIX/Oracle systems * Senior application developers In addition, this book will be of value to the following audiences. * Technology managers Computer science students

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201325748
• ISBN 13: 9780201325744
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 544