What’s the Point?

Whenever you look at any technology, or any feature within a technology, it’s worth asking why you might want to use it—what’s the benefit? If you can’t describe what you hope to achieve, then you can’t decide how best to use the technology and how to measure your degree of success.

There are two arguments put forward for RAC—scalability and high availability, and the scalability argument comes in two flavors: throughput and response time. So, before you start chasing RAC, you need to decide which of these two arguments matters to you, and how best to implement RAC on your site to ensure that you turn the theory into reality.

High Availability

The theory of high availability says that if one of the nodes in your RAC system fails, ...

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