"Jeff McWilliams" <Jeff.McWilliams_at_NO.clanmcwilliams.SPAM.org> wrote in
message news:slrnd0cnpo.reh.Jeff.McWilliams_at_heavy3.home.int...
> How scalable are the replication features on Oracle 9.2? Is anyone aware
of
> any good studies on this?
>
> I've been asked by a small mortgage/loan company to help them design a
> solution that will support their growth plans for their customer/loan
> database system.
>
> They currently have 8 offices. Their IT person thinks they want to
> run a database server at each office with replication back to a
> centralized server. This would be updateable materialized views or
> multi-master replication.
>
> Here's where it gets really difficult:
>
> Their growth plan calls for 100 offices in 5 years, and 850 offices in
> 10 years. Ignore for the moment all the other issues maintaining 850
servers.
>
> I have my doubts that replication can even scale to this size, but I've
> never dealt with anything on this scale before, and I'm tempted to walk
> away from project.
>
> If it were me, I'd be tempted to push for a web based application that's
> centrally located and sits on a load-balancing cluster of web/app servers.
> However, I don't have all the details about their app yet to determine
> if that's realistic - plus that design would have the downside of
> cutting off the branch offices if they had a network outage.
>
> Can anyone point to any case studies for "distributed" databases on
> such a scale?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jeff
>
I think if you did some financial analysis on the cost of the servers and
administration costs, plus the nightmare of upgrading that many servers with
software patches and new releases, that might help convince them.
I know one large bank in the Pacific Northwest that is still using OS/2
operating system on their servers with a DBMS version that has been out of
support for about 5 years, just because of the cost and logistical nightmare
of trying to upgrade at their hundreds of remote sites where they are
installed.
Received on Sun Feb 06 2005 - 10:19:56 CST
