Real Application Clusters Handbook Book Review

Implement Flexible, Scalable, High Availability Database Solutions

The key to designing a highly available system relies on eliminating single point failures in all critical components. Clusters provide an enterprise with uninterrupted access to business critical information. Clusters can be configured with various failover modes, and they also provide inifnite scalability to business applications.

The beginning of the Real Application Clusters handbook gives you an overview of clustering basics and the history of clustering as well as the architecture of RAC such as single instance vs a RAC environment.

The book then covers preinstallation tasks and then it walks you through installing and setting up an RAC database, both GUI screenshots and command line installation output is included.

‘Real Application Clusters Handbook’ contains a useful chapter on automatic storage management which is a feature that makes DBAs lives a lot easier by automatically spreading and looking after datafiles.

There are a couple of chapters on RAC basic administration and how to backup and recover your RAC database. Other chapters in the ‘Real Application Clusters Handbook’ includes RAC performance management, a closer look at Cache Fusion, Workload and Connection management, RAC troubleshooting, RAC extensions and finally developing applications for RAC.

The end of the book provides you with two appendices, one is a RAC reference and the other is about adding and removing cluster nodes.

Overall ‘Real Application Clusters Handbook’ is a very clear and concise book which covers a very niche area of Oracle. The ‘Real Application Clusters Handbook’ is well laid out and includes a number of screen shots as well as diagrams and command line code. This is a good handbook on Oracle RAC.