10 billion transactions a year?

We are looking at the need to build an application that can scale to upwards of 10 billion transactions/year. We've managed a data mart containing 2 billion transactions, but this new application will require a fair amount of complex processing to post the transactions (the data mart just reads/maps/plops) so isn't a good extrapolation of our knowledge.

My two best guesses at an architecture to support something like this: a) a good sized computational cluster, essentially sharing the work b) some sort of master/slave organization with the slaves using database links to perform the majority of the processing, with the master being relegated to more or less a "posting machine"

Comments?

Any experiences anybody has had with volumes anywhere near this would be of interest - even if they were *bad* experiences (at least we might be able to avoid some black holes). Received on Sun Jul 22 2001 - 08:12:58 CDT