This title provides comprehensive coverage of the features, technology and principles of the product RAC that is part of the Oracle9i release of Oracle's RDBMS product. This book is divided into three main parts covering various areas of the application/database design, development and maintenance life cycles. Starting with the fundamentals, an introduction to the concepts of the various hardware architectures and the clustering technology available, the book discusses the pros and cons, leading into discussion of the RAC technology. After the formal introduction of the concepts of clustering and configurations, the book discusses the various theories of asynchronous (parallelism) and synchronous processing and how this theory could be applied to the database tier of the enterprise architecture.