In this post, we will take a look at the advantages of Oracle Sharding.

• Linear scalability with complete fault isolation. OLTP applications designed for Oracle sharding can elastically scale (data, transactions and users) to any level, on any platform, simply by deploying new shards on additional stand-alone servers. The unavailability or slowdown of a shard due to either an unplanned outage or planned maintenance affects only the users of that shard, it does not affect the availability or performance of the application for users of other shards. Upon the unavailability of a shard, failover is initiated automatically to another copy of the data. Each shard may run a different release of the Oracle Database as long as the application is backward compatible with the oldest running version – making it simple to maintain availability of an application while performing database maintenance.

• Global data distribution for data proximity – to bring data closer to the consumers and data sovereignty – to meet data privacy regulations.

• Simplicity via automation of many life-cycle management tasks including: automatic creation of shards and replication, system managed partitioning, single command deployment, elastic scale-out and fine-grained resharding.
• Superior run-time performance using intelligent, data-dependent routing.
• All of the advantages of sharding without sacrificing the capabilities of an enterprise RDBMS, including: relational schema, SQL, and other programmatic interfaces, complex data types, online schema changes, multi-core scalability, advanced security, compression, high-availability, ACID properties, consistent reads, developer agility with JSON, and much more.

Having looked at the benefits, in the next post we will study the key capabilities of Oracle Sharding.