Scalability

Abstract

Scalability can be defined in many ways and from many different perspectives. However, from a capacity planning perspective, a solid definition is that scalability is a function that represents the relationship between workload and throughput. The workload is essentially the arrival rate, and the throughput is the rate of work being completed. If a system scales perfectly, then a linear relationship exists between an increasing workload and the resulting throughput. But we all know that doesn’t happen in real-life production Oracle systems. As I’ll present in this chapter, even with very ingenious and creative approaches, there are a number of very real reasons why systems don’t scale linearly.