Real Application Clusters

Why Oracle RAC's unique capabilities excel

• Unique Scale Everything Architecture

  • Oracle RAC transparently delivers ultralow latency and high throughput for all data workloads. It uniquely unifies and fuses data caches across servers for ultra-fast local data access while parallelizing any workload across servers to provide maximum throughput.

  • Unlike single-purpose databases that only scale specific workloads such as analytics or key-value operations, Oracle RAC scales all workloads on-premises, on hybrid, and public clouds.

• Simple & Complex Workload Scaling

  • The unique scale everything architecture of Oracle RAC benefits databases and workloads of all types, from simple use cases to workloads requiring hundreds of thousands of tables, indexes, and millions of SQL statements. Even the world’s most sophisticated applications, including SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle PeopleSoft, and Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, can benefit from Oracle RAC.

  • Unlike databases that require modifying the data model to scale, Oracle RAC allows schemas to be designed around the applications’ needs, not the database’s limits.

• High Throughput Parallelization

  • Oracle RAC dramatically accelerates long-running workloads such as analytics, batch, indexing, data reorganization, and application schema changes by transparently distributing and parallelizing queries, updates, inserts, and deletes across multiple servers. This enables SQL requests to leverage all available CPU, memory, and I/O resources.

  • Other databases often parallelize queries only, limit write operations to one server, or can only parallelize based on a single sharding key.

• Ultra-Fast Response Time

  • Oracle RAC delivers ultra-low SQL response times for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads by enabling ultra-fast local data access and avoiding costly cross-server messaging. When running on Oracle Exadata, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) across servers further boosts performance.

  • Many scale-out databases scale reads using replicas but route all writes through a single primary server, limiting OLTP scalability and increasing the risk of stale data.

• Extreme Mission-Critical Availability

  • Oracle RAC helps ensure application continuity by automatically and transparently failing over workloads from impacted servers to surviving servers in the cluster. It also enables online patching and updates with no downtime or disruption. This allows customers to swiftly and regularly update and protect their database systems against increasingly frequent and sophisticated security vulnerabilities.

  • Unlike other databases that abort workloads during failover or updates, often requiring restarts or causing user-visible errors, Oracle RAC enables uninterrupted operation by gracefully migrating sessions, avoiding restarts, errors, and brownouts during planned maintenance and unplanned downtime.

• Optimized for Developer Adoption

  • Oracle RAC transparently delivers ultra-low latency, the highest throughput, the fastest SQL response time, and application continuity. It seamlessly integrates into the application development lifecycle, including continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows, by allowing rolling database and application schema updates.

  • Unlike other databases, Oracle RAC does not require any code changes for its scalability, high availability, or performance improvement features. This makes it the most developer-friendly mission-critical database solution.