Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) definition

This is an Oracle RAC database administration, task-oriented guide that shows you how to configure and manage the environment for Oracle Clusterware and Oracle RAC. This Post also explains what is an Oracle RAC database and how it to be define.

Real Application Cluster (RAC) is a component of the Oracle 9i database product that allows a database to be installed across multiple servers. According to Oracle, RAC's shared disk method of clustering databases: increases scalability because servers can easily be added or subtracted to meet current needs, lowers costs because companies don't have to buy high-end servers, and improves availability because if one server fails, another can assume its workload.

RAC's shared disk architecture is an unusual approach to database clustering. Most competing database products (such as Microsoft's SQL Server and IBM's DB2 for Windows and Unix environments) use the alternative, which is known as "shared nothing" architecture. Shared nothing architecture partitions data and only gives each server access to its own disk subsystem, while shared disk architecture gives all servers access to the entire database. This adds fail over capacity to the database, because all servers have access to the whole database. Proponents claim that this capacity increases 9i's reliability and availability significantly. British Telecom, for example, reported that deploying the product enabled them to cut their fail-over time from a typical 20 minutes to between 10-60 seconds.