Show description

The audience were somewhat taken aback when the speaker introduced the topic by saying that he had no access to Oracle9i itself, nor had he seen or read any Oracle9i documentation, but that his presentation was based on research he had performed by reading magazine articles on the subject. One of the unwritten rules of membership of the OakTable is that the members have good solid proofs for their "opinions"; that particular "expert" is not a member. Oracle documentation is not universally accurate, but it is a great place to start on almost any technical issue.

You can achieve guaranteed access with replicated tables because primary key uniqueness can be maintained, but if the table is partitioned across servers, then application code will be required to prevent two rows with the same primary key being inserted into different (logical) partitions of the table on different nodes. It is also worth noting that Oracle's customer base has been "less than unanimous" in its adoption of distributed databases. At the time of writing it is unclear how fully the world will adopt the Oracle vision of grid computing disclosed by the Oracle 109 announcements.

To that extent it can be viewed as a rather extended introduction. If at any point you are not enjoying the chapter and, like me, always want to get into the real subject matter of any book, then I would encourage you to skip to another chapter that looks more promising. The second reason follows quite naturally from the first. My research for this chapter uncovered a number of interesting facts of which either I had not previously been aware or which I had forgotten. However, this chapter is written primarily from my own experiences and observations, just as each of the other chapters is based on the considerable experience of its individual author or authors.