Scaling Oracle8i

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.

Table of contents

Chapter 1: Scaling Concepts
Chapter 2: Hardware Architectures and I/O Subsystems
Chapter 3: Benchmark Concepts and Design
Chapter 4: System/Database Monitoring
Chapter 5: Physical Oracle
Chapter 6: Oracle8 in Operation
Chapter 7: Introduction to UNIX
Chapter 8: Oracle User's Guide to UNIX
Chapter 9: Scalable Transaction Processing
Chapter 10: Pulling It All Together: A Case Study
Chapter 11: Building a Successful Team
Chapter 12: Pitfalls
Chapter 13: Internet Applications and the Future