Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), is an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition and included with Oracle Database 11g. Standard Edition (on clusters with a maximum of 4 sockets). Oracle RAC supports the deployment of a single database across a cluster of servers, providing unbeatable fault tolerance, performance, and scalability with no application changes necessary. Analysts are taking note of Oracle RAC's growing importance with a wide range of customers across all industries for transaction processing and data warehousing applications.

Oracle Real Application Clusters provides unlimited scalability and high availability for packaged and custom applications by running Oracle Database in a clustered hardware configuration, yet the database is simply and easily managed just like a single system.

Oracle Real Application Clusters enables all applications to exploit cluster database availability, scalability and performance with no application modifications. Applications can treat Oracle Real Application Clusters as a single system and do not need to be modified or partitioned to achieve near-linear cluster database scalability. This means you can horizontally scale the database tier as demand continues to grow, without changes to the application.

Oracle Real Application Clusters is self-tuning and adapts to the changing nature of the database workload. It dynamically shifts database resources across the cluster servers for optimal performance.


*Oracle Database Enterprise Edition Options must match the corresponding database licenses in both quantity and metric. For example if you have 150 Named User Plus EE Database License then all option products must also be licensed for 150 Named User Plus licenses.