Oracle Applications DBA Blog

Top 50 RAC-Related Acronyms

Couple of days ago i read Eddie Award’s Post on Top 50 SOA-Related Acronyms and found it very interesting. Lately i have been working on Oracle Applications RAC environments and realized that RAC had its own set of frequently used Acronyms. In this post I have put together my 'Top 50' of the RAC Acronyms. Some of these might be related to other technologies also but they find a place in this list as they also relate RAC and Oracle Applications.

• RAC (Real Application Clusters) Is Oracle Implementation of Clustered Database Instances.
• CRS (Cluster Ready Services) Oracle's own clusterware tightly coupled with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC).
• OCSF (Oracle Cluster File System) Oracle File system Implementation For Linux.
• PCP (Parallel Concurrent Processing) PCP allows concurrent processing activities to be distributed across multiple nodes in an RAC environment, maximizing throughput and providing resilience to node failure.
• OCR (Oracle Cluster Registry) The OCR contains cluster and database configuration information for RAC and Cluster Ready Services (CRS).
• ASM (Automatic Storage Management) Simplifies database administration by enabling you to create disk groups and manage them instead of individual datafiles.
• SSH (Secure Shell) SSH is a set of standards and an associated network protocol that allows establishing a secure channel between a local and a remote computer.
• RSH (Remote Shell) rsh (remote shell) is a command line computer program which can execute shell commands as another user, and on another computer across a computer network.
• DSA (Digital Signature Algorithm) The Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) is a United States Federal Government standard or FIPS for digital signatures.
• SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) standard interface and command set for transferring data between devices commonly used for interfaces for hard disks, and USB and FireWire connections for external devices.
• NAS (Network-attached storage) Is a dedicated data storage technology that can be connected directly to a computer network to provide centralized data access and storage to heterogeneous network clients.
• NFS (Network Filesystem) is a protocol allows a user on a client computer to access files over a network as easily as if attached to its local disks.
• OSCP (Oracle Storage Compatibility Program) An Oracle Programe To assist third-parties with their Oracle compatibility with respect to storage devices.
• DTP (Distributed Transaction Processing) DTP model is the synchronization of any commits and rollbacks that are required to complete a distributed transaction request.
• VIP (virtual IP Address) is an IP address that is not connected to a specific computer or network interface card (NIC) on a computer.
• TCP/IP ( Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP)
• DNS (Domain Name Server) The domain name system is responsible for translating  it translates domain names (computer hostnames) to IP addresses.
• MAC (Media Access Control) Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier attached to most network adapters.
• JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) A Java API that allows independent connectivity between the Java programming language and a wide range of databases.
• LB (Load Balancing) Is a technique to balance the load between configured servers.
• FAN (Fast Application Notification) enables end-to-end, lights-out recovery of applications and load balancing when a cluster configuration changes.
• FCF (Fast Connection Failover) Fast Connection Failover provides the ability to failover connections in the connection cache as quickly and efficiently as the database itself.
• TAF (Transparent Application Failover) Using transparent application recovery (TAF), Oracle can automatically reconnect users to the database in the case of instance or node failure.
• OCI (Oracle Call Interface) OCI allows you to develop applications that take advantage of the capabilites of SQL from within the application.
• ODP (Oracle Data Provider) ODP.NET features optimized data access to the Oracle database from a .NET environment.
• ONS (Oracle Names Server) Oracle Names makes network address and database link information available to all nodes throughout the network.
• ORION (Oracle I/O) ORION is a test tool freely available tool which simulates Oracle I/O.
• GSD (Global Services Daemon) The Global Services Daemon (GSD) background process allows usage of Oracle Enterprise Manager or the SRVCTL utility to perform system management tasks.
• NTP (Network Time Protocol) The Network Time Protocol (NTP) is a protocol for synchronizing the clocks of computer.
• CVU (Cluster Verification Utility) CVU is used to verify all the important components that need to be verified at different stages in a RAC environment.
• VSD (Virtual Shared Disk) A Virtual Shared Disk (VSD) facility is a layer of software that allows a processing node to access disk devices physically attached to a remote node as if those devices were attached locally.
• LPARs (Logical Partitions) a Logical Partition, commonly called an LPAR, is a virtualized computing environment abstracted from all physical devices.
• DBCA (Oracle Database Configuration Assistant) An Oracle utility that facilitates the creation and configuration of a database.
• ORACM (Oracle Cluster Manager) allows to add new nodes to an existing cluster without having to stop/start the whole cluster.
• RDA (Remote Diagnostic Agent) An Oracle Diagnostic Tool used in troubleshooting.
• GFS (Global Filesystem) GFS allows a cluster of Linux servers to share data in a common pool of storage.
• NIC (Network Interface Controller) is a piece of computer hardware designed to allow computers to communicate over a computer network.
• LVM (Logical Volume Manager)
• GPFS (General Parrel File System) GPFS is IBM’s high-performance parallel, scalable file system for IBM UNIX clusters.
• HA (High Avaliblity)
• MAA (Maximum Availability Architecture)
• RACDDT (RAC Data Collection Tool) is a data collection tool designed and configured specifically for gathering diagnostic data related to Oracle's Real Application Cluster (RAC) technology.
• OSW (OSWatcher) is an operating system diagnostic utility tool that gathers archival performance data using various native Unix utilities, such as vmstat, iostat and top.
• OLS (Oracle Label Security) Oracle Label Security is developed based on virtual private database (VPD) technology and provides a flexible, fine-grained access control functionality that is achieved by comparing a sensitive label assigned to a piece of data with label authorizations assigned to an application user.
• RSM (Remote Shared Memory) is a feature that bypasses the UDP/IP communication in Solaris.
• UDP/IP (User Datagram Protocol) can send short messages sometimes known as datagrams to one another.
• TNS (Transparent Network Substrate) Allows peer-to-peer connectivity where no machine-level connectivity can occur.
• EMCA (Enterprise Manager Configuration Assistant) An Oracle tool to set up the Enterprise Manager.
• OPS (Oracle Parallel Server) The OPS option allows multiple instances on different computer systems (nodes) can access the same database files simultaneously.
• SRVCTL (Server Control) A utility to assist in administration and maintenance of RAC databases.

Hope you enjoyed reading them as much as I did compiling them ;)