In the last blog post, we looked at why a given customer would be interested in Oracle Sharding.  In this post, let’s see some examples of various customers and their applications that can benefit from Oracle Sharding. These target customers for Oracle sharding can come from any industry vertical. Examples include:

• Mass Media and Financial Information Services providers who need massive scalability with high availability for online storage and retrieval of information.
• Airline ticketing systems whose main driver for sharding is fault isolation. They want to shard across tens of independent databases. Failure of a database only makes 1/N of the data momentarily unavailable.
• Social Media companies who may wish to allocate different shards for different classes of users/customer profiles, at different price levels.
• Online Payment Systems that shard for linear scalability and fault isolation, and who may need to satisfy regulatory requirements for storing user data in the country of citizenship.
• Financial and Tax preparation companies who shard by customer id to scale users, workload and transactions. Sharding provides these companies with elasticity required when demand for service peaks during tax filing season.
• Large billing systems where each customer can be identified by a customer ID, phone number, or user ID.

In summary, Oracle Sharding 12.2.0.1 is a good fit for the applications (OLTP and data analytics) whose primary access pattern is based on a sharding key. The secondary pattern – multi-shard querying is also supported for reporting and data aggregation use cases. In the next blog post, I will cover the salient capabilities of Oracle Sharding.

For more info, do visit the Oracle Sharding portal on Oracle Technology Network (OTN). Follow me on Twitter @nageshbattula