High Performance and Availability with Oracle RAC and PHP
Review real-world experiences in deploying a business-critical
PHP app over Oracle Real Application Clusters.  By John Lim
Published June 2009  Running a software application that is able
to work reliably through hardware and software failures is
incredibly hard. Our client, a Malaysian bank, commissioned us
to develop a Web-based financial application for them that would
be used in an intranet setting and was considered mission-
critical. This meant that they that wanted a system that was
reliable and had automatic failover to another server whenever
any component failed.  In this article, I will cover the
network, architecture and design of our RAC application. Then I
will discuss the real-world experiences and problems we
experienced. The experiences in general are also relevant even
if you are using Java or .NET or your application and not PHP.
Our Oracle RAC Setup  We proposed PHP for the application with
the data stored in Oracle Database 10gR2