Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

A unique Oracle database feature is Real Application Clusters (RAC).  RAC allows multiple database servers to work on the same database simultaneously, improving scalability and fault tolerance.  

Another interesting Oracle database feature is Automatic Storage Management (ASM).  ASM allows you to specify a disk group of storage devices rather than the traditional datafile when creating or modifying a database structure such as a tablespace. ASM creates and manages the datafiles across all the disk group automatically.

Both of these features have the potential to drop your operating costs:  RAC allows you to use a cluster of inexpensive servers instead of a single massive SMP box, and ASM allows you to use a cluster of inexpensive disks instead of a single massive disk array.

RAC & ASM for E-Business Suite Users

Here's where things get interesting for E-Business Suite users:  E-Business Suite Release 11i is certified with 9i RAC, 10gR1 RAC & ASM and 10gR2 RAC & ASM.


As an aside, we use 10gR1 RAC with our own E-Business Suite Release 11i instance for Oracle's corporate Global Single Instance.  We're planning an upgrade to 10gR2 in the near future.

Initially Awkward with 10gR1

This is all good, but our first version of the E-Business Suite certification with 10gR1 RAC and ASM had an awkward restriction.  To use this combination, you first had to migrate your E-Business Suite environment to RAC.  After that was done, you could then migrate your RAC environment to ASM.

There were very good technical reasons for doing things this way, but no matter.  This proved to be really problematic for customers who decided to take advantage of ASM long before they even considered switching to RAC. 


Awkward No Longer

We have a small but brilliant team working in this area and they have managed to lift that restriction for E-Business Suite users.  With the latest version of the 10gR1 RAC & ASM Installation Guide, you can now do this in any order you'd like:  RAC then ASM, or ASM then RAC.

This restriction doesn't exist with our 10gR2 certification, so DBAs who waited for that certification can use RAC and ASM in any order today.

Editor Jan 23 2007 Update:  Transparent Data Encryption is now certified with the E-Business Suite.  See this article for full details.


As with the newly-announced Database Vault feature, there's been an equally large surge of recent questions about whether Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) is certified with the E-Business Suite.

As a core database technology, Transparent Data Encryption may generally be assumed to work with the E-Business Suite with no issues.  It is designed to be transparent, after all.

That said, the E-Business Suite covers a lot of territory, and Apps DBAs unfamiliar with its data model might need some guidance on how to set up Transparent Data Encryption to meet their security requirements.

We're gearing up internal projects to develop some best practices around this for E-Business Suite environments.  Following that, we plan to publish some white papers summarizing those best practices and guidelines.

We don't have any firm schedules for these papers yet, but feel free to subscribe to this blog if you'd like to be notified when they're available.