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To get a good idea of what Oracle can do with respect to grid
computing, please take a look at the Oracle 10g New Features
documentation. There are sections in this document on grid computing and grid
management.
When you have systems in a grid, Oracle does make it easier to deploy
the Oracle software and patch those instances in the grid, rather than
perform these actions individually on each grid node. And with RAC, you
can add and remove nodes easier than you could prior to 10g. I have not
seen anything new in 10R2 that signficantly improves what was available
in R1.
With the grid concept, you should have a means of "delivering
information to users whenever they need it, regardless of where it
resides on the grid" (quote from the Oracle docs). While 10g lets you
use RAC to add and remove nodes from a one cluster to another to handle
resource demands, it still does not make Information Provisioning a
seamless operation. If a user is accessing a RAC cluster and wants the
data in another cluster, then Oracle's mechanisms for making that data
available are Transportable Tablespaces and Oracle Streams.
It would be nice if the cluster could access another cluster
seamlessly, kind of like a cluster of clusters. This is where the true
power of grid computing will show the biggest benefits. But Oracle is
not there yet in making all of this seamless. You still have to
transport data (with TTS or Streams) and then worry about handling
changes to that data. Oracle is not alone in their position on grid
computing. Sun Microsystems and others have done work in the grid arena
and the technology is still being defined and developed. I do not see
where 10gR2 has made any major strides over 10gR1.
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