The early days of Real Application Clusters (RAC) were heavy on promise but light on quality delivery. Many early RAC installations trying to go beyond two nodes encountered significant issues. As a result,many organizations are reticent to embrace RAC. RAC usage is now widely successful and common in large installations.SELECT’s Editor Dr. Paul Dorsey asked…

In this article, Lipowitz demonstrates the unusual case where gathering statistics, and gathering statistics alone, drastically changes execution plans.

Carr discusses Oracle Database add-on features throughout previous versions and highlightsthe Cube Organized Material Views in Oracle Database 11g.

Hartmann discusses RMAN in Oracle Database 11g and the Data Recovery Adviser. Hedemonstrates this tool by providing an example of using the new 11g repair interfaces forblock media recovery.

Learn five things about services that are not well understood and see how they can help toincrease availability and performance of Oracle Databases (RAC and non-RAC)

Norris introduces Real Application Clusters (RAC) to beginner DBAs by providingunderstanding about how RAC works.

In the second article in a series on NLS data, Gary expands on common misconceptions about NLS data, shows common error message encountered with corrupt NLS data, and provides some methods to view and understand NLS data in the Oracle database.

This article is part two of a three-part series on Web services. In this part, Chris discussesconsuming Web services in an Oracle database.

Dave offers some important components of a performance-management strategy that willhelp readers keep their Oracle environment running with less downtime.

Tanel takes an in-depth look at latches and how to determine and resolve latch contention inOracle databases.