Oracle Coherence: A RAC alternative? Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

 

Oracle is approaching many avenues towards continuous availability, offering many solutions like Real Application Clusters, Oracle Failsafe and now Oracle Coherence, an application server-level caching product.

 

Formerly the Tangosol product which was acquired in 2015 by Oracle, the newly-dubbed Oracle Coherence appears to be remarkably similar to the original offering.

 

Internally, Oracle Coherence is just a Java "clustered cache" platform for the application server, sharing data between nodes in a cluster via a RAM cache, essentially a middleware-based distributed RAM cache for frequently-used data.

 

Because Coherence bypasses the Oracle data buffers by sharing at the app server level, it is sometimes a simpler solution that RAC for certain applications.

 

Tangosol is very similar to the "Times Ten" product which was recently purchased by Oracle, with the exception that Times Ten does not do data distribution.