Advanced features of Oracle Net include failover and load balancing. These features are actually interrelated in as much as you usually don’t have one without the other. While they are mostly used in a RAC environment, they can be set up in a single instance environment as well.

FAILOVER:
In the context of Oracle Net, failover refers to the mechanism of switching over to an alternate resource when connection to the primary resource gets terminated due to any reason. Connection failure may be broadly categorized as:

To continue with the shared server series, as mentioned in my last post, I will here be taking up the issues of configuration of memory, and the management of shared servers using available data dictionary views and initialization parameters.
How much memory should you configure for shared servers?

So, to continue with our shared server series, let's begin with how a user connects through a shared server connection:

This is the first of my three-part series dealing with Shared servers: Today an organization can have hundreds or thousands of users connecting to their databases. The traditional dedicated server model maps each user to a dedicated process running on the database server. Each dedicated server process requires memory and as the number of users increase, there is a linear increase in the demand for memory.