Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 4 PLANNING 77
Network Sizing
Finally, you must give some consideration to network requirements. A database that
services hundreds of connections might require multiple network cards in order to meet
performance targets. Fast connections are required to the storage area network (SAN)
and between the nodes in an RAC cluster.
Tip A large number of approved hardware and software configurations are listed at
. Each listed configuration has
been tested and approved by Oracle and includes storage, network, and operating system details. You can
safely use any one of these configurations as a starting point to design a system that meets your requirements.
Summary
Here is a short summary of the concepts touched upon in this chapter.
Standard Edition is attractively priced
but can only be used on servers with a maximum capacity of four CPUs. Enterprise
Edition is expensive but offers high-end features such as parallelism and SQL results
caching. Certain other features that are only available with Enterprise Edition require
additional fees; the list includes features such as partitioning, management packs
such as Diagnostics Pack and Tuning Pack, and new features introduced in Oracle
Database 11g such as Active Standby and Total Recall.
Oracle documentation is freely downloadable and searchable at
.
dedicated server configuration is the most common configuration; each user
session is handled by a dedicated process.
shared server configuration conserves resources; a small set of shared processes
and dispatchers handles all sessions.
Connection pooling can be used in the application tier or in the database tier if the
application is stateless; for example, an Internet-based application. Oracle Database
11g offers database resident connection pooling to supplement connection
pooling in the application tier.