Each day, more than 500,000 people rely on Advance America for cash advances. With a growing number of service locations and a greater need to measure their performance in real-time, Advance America needed a highly available and scaleable information technology (IT) system to support thousands of centers and enterprise applications. The company is consolidating a mix of Oracle and third-party databases into one centralized database, Oracle Database 10g, and is using Oracle Real Application Clusters to distribute their workload across multiple servers to help ensure 24x7 uptime and the ability to easily scale as centers are added. Running on a cluster of four IBM Power eServer p5 550 servers, Oracle Database 10g will support the entirety of Advance America's centers, in addition to the company's PeopleSoft Financials and PeopleSoft Human Capital Management applications.

"With a growth rate of more than 20 percent year over year, we needed a solution that would enable us to continue to scale," said David Toothman, Chief Information Officer, Advance America. "Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters enable us to meet our current IT system needs and will assuredly allow us to address our long term IT requirements as we add new centers and take on more transactions."

Advance America is taking advantage of the clustering, automation and self-managing capabilities available in Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g to increase overall quality of service, while decreasing technology costs. Oracle Clusterware eliminated the need to purchase additional third-party clusterware to build the company's server cluster configuration and Oracle Automatic Storage Management reduced the complexity associated with managing data and disks.

Specifically, Advance America uses Oracle Automatic Storage Management to make it easier to share storage resources across multiple servers. It automatically rebalances the data while the system is online when new disks are added or removed and intelligently alleviates hot spots as needed. Using Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g, the company is taking advantage of the system information captured and analyzed by Oracle Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor and Oracle Automatic Workload Repository to help detect, diagnose and resolve performance problems.

About Advance America
Founded in 1997, Advance America, Cash Advance Centers, Inc. is the country's leading payday cash advance services provider with over 2,600 centers in 37 states. Operating under the brand names Advance America and National Cash Advance, the Company offers convenient, less-costly, credit options to consumers whose needs are not met by traditional financial institutions. The Company is a founding member of the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), whose mission is to promote laws that provide substantive consumer protections and to encourage responsible industry practices.

About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

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