What makes Oracle more scalable?

Question

Oracle seems to have a reputation for being more scalable than other RDBMSes. After working with it a bit, I can say that it's more complex than other RDBMSes, but I haven't really seen anything that makes it more scalable than other RDBMSes. But then again, I haven't really worked on it in a whole lot of depth.

What features does Oracle have that are more scalable?

Answer 1

Oracle's RAC architecture is what makes it scalable where it can load balance across nodes and parallel queries can be split up and pushed to other nodes for processing.

Some of the tricks like loading blocks from another node's buffer cache instead of going to disc make performance a lot more scalable.

Also, the maintainability of RAC with rolling upgrades help make the operation of a large system more sane.

There is also a different aspect of scalability - storage scalability. ASM makes increasing the storage capacity very straightforward. A well designed ASM based solution, should scale past the 100s of terabyte size without needing to do anything very special.

Whether these make Oracle more scalable than other RDBMSs, I don't know. But I think I would feel less happy about trying to scale up a non-Oracle database.