Parallel database applications were one of the first commercial applications to use cluster technology. By partitioning the workload and data across multiple nodes in a cluster, parallel database applications can achieve performance beyond the limits of a single, large multiprocessor server.
The OPS (Oracle Parallel Server) has been the leader in parallel database applications since it was first deployed on commercial UNIX platforms in the early 90s. The Oracle 9iRAC and Oracle 10g Cache Fusion technology, which take advantage of the high-speed, interprocess communication API that PRIMECLUSTER provides, now overcomes the performance bottleneck of previous OPS implementations (that is, where database instances communicated through a secondary storage system).
