Performance and Scalability

SAP software customers can leverage a range of Oracle Database features and optional products to improve performance and scalability.

Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) is a volume manager and a file system for Oracle database files (single Instance as well as Real Application Clusters implementations). Oracle ASM is Oracle's recommended storage management solution that provides an alternative to conventional volume managers, file systems, and raw devices. Oracle Automatic Storage Management Cluster File System (ACFS) is a new multi-platform, scalable file system and storage management design that extends Oracle ASM technology to support all of your application data (files other than database files). Oracle ASM Dynamic Volume Manager (ADVM) provides volume management services and a standard disk device driver interface.

• White Paper: SAP on Oracle Automatic Storage Management 11 g R2. Configuration Guidelines for UNIX/LINUX (PDF)
• White Paper: Moving your SAP database to Oracle 11 g R2 ASM. A Best Practices Guide (PDF)

With Oracle Database 11g Release 2, you can configure Oracle Database to access NAS devices directly using Oracle Direct NFS Client rather than using the operating system kernel NFS client. These files are also accessible via the operating system kernel NFS client, thereby allowing seamless administration.

With Oracle's Cache Fusion cluster database architecture, a new shared cache architecture that overcomes the limitations of traditional shared-nothing and shared-disk approaches to provide highly scalable and available database systems, RAC provides SAP users with uninterrupted server access regardless of hardware and/or software failures.

• White Paper: Configuration of SAP NetWeaver for Oracle Grid Infrastructure 11.2.0.2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g Release 2: A Best Practices Guide (PDF)
• White Paper: Providing High Availability for SAP Resources with Oracle Clusterware 11 Release 2 (PDF)
• Customer Case Studies

SecureFiles delivers high performance for file or unstructured data comparable to that of traditional file systems while retaining the advantages of the Oracle Database. Applications can transparently take advantage of industry-standard encryption for added security and intelligent storage features like compression and deduplication for increased space savings and faster performance. With SecureFiles, organizations can manage all relational data and associated file data in Oracle using a single security/audit model and a unified backup & recovery process, and perform seamless search across all information.

Oracle Partitioning allows tables, indexes, and index-organized tables to be subdivided into smaller pieces, enabling these database objects to be managed and accessed at a finer level of granularity. Oracle provides a comprehensive range of partitioning schemes to address every business requirement. Since it is entirely transparent in SQL statements, partitioning can be applied to any application, from OLTP (e.g. SAP ERP) to Data Warehousing (e.g. SAP BW)

Explore other features of Oracle Database to find out why it is the database of choice for the majority of SAP customers.

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