Re: questions on scalability

Anything that needs to be computed more then a certain amount of times per day should require a summary table. You pay your licenses per CPU, not per GIG of data stored.

But yes.. I said in an almost optimal world 2-4 CPUs will be enough to support a large amount of users. Testing an application is always needed prior to any 'real 'deployment. Some vendors are willing to give you machines to 'test', from others you can 'rent'.

I am fortunate enough to be able to influence the application design at my current job. And although it's not perfect in many aspects (poor schema design in places), after seeing some other Oracle installations I know ours is better than 85% of them (at least in the small to medium (.5TB) database installations I have seen). At any given time we have tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people on our web site going through fairly database intensive pages, all supported on three quad CPU servers, 2 of which are very underutilized. We cache some non-user specific data on application servers, we cache some user-specific data in cookies, we use replication/snapshots to avoid queries across the link, we use summary tables so that we don't have to calculate many 'sums' and 'avgs' on the fly (sports statistics data).This has allowed us to not spend 50% of datacenter budget on Oracle licenses. Received on Sat Apr 22 2006 - 00:06:15 CDT