Oracle Corp has added a Multi-Client Server option for Version 6.0 of the Oracle relational database management system, initially for Unix systems. Oracle says it provides enhanced support for transaction processing applications with very large user configurations of 250 or more users without degrading transaction processing performance, modifying the client-server architecture to enable multiple client processes to attach to one or more server processes. The new architecture substitutes Oracle’s current architecture, in which there is a one-to-one correlation between each client process and server process, thus reducing the process switching overhead and ensuring that Oracle-based systems maintain high throughput as customers add users and enabling the Oracle kernel to support much larger user configurations – up to three times as many users on a Sun machine. It is free to existing users, but needs a new SQL Net TCP/IP driver, at from $3,750 for 32 users to $26,100 for more than 256 users; both will be available in first quarter 1991.
