A concurrent connection is the number of connections available to your database in any given second.

Read the information below to learn more about this important feature of Oracle10g shared databases.

How are database connections different from ssh, ftp, and telnet connections?

There are two types of database connections: OLTP and Persistent.

An OLTP database connection is the standard connection type for Web transactions, and lasts only as long as a transaction takes to complete, and then disconnects. For example, you can have a limit of 10 transactions in a single second, and each of those transactions takes a fraction of a second to complete.

A persistent database connection uses a single connection to conduct multiple transactions. With either type of connection, it requires a lot of traffic to exceed the maximum number of connections in any given second.

Why does Verio limit concurrent connections?

By setting limits on concurrent connections, we ensure your transactions get through, and other users don't hinder your use of the system.

Oracle in a shared environment is much different than running Oracle on a dedicated server. In a shared environment, concurrent connections to the database become an important limitation to understand. This is because a separate Oracle process is required to handle each connection in an Oracle database, and each process may require up to 2 MB of memory. All database installations — even Dedicated installations of Oracle and others — limit the number of concurrent connections based on the upper limit of memory and CPU available.

For example, consider an Oracle shared server with 30 customer accounts at 100 concurrent connections per account. If each customer averaged only 30 percent of their maximum — or 33 connections per customer — the total number of concurrent connections would average 990. At 2 MB per process, the machine would be using 1980 MB of RAM. This does not include shared memory for database buffering, or any memory for core OS/DB processes. In addition, at 990 concurrent connections, a great deal of processor time is burned just handling context switches. Under these circumstances, the server would slow to a crawl very quickly.

Limiting concurrent connections enables us to dedicate more memory to each individual process to dramatically increase the performance of your queries. Because of these precautions, complex transactions run much faster than with other databases. More dedicated memory is available to each process, and a high amount of system memory is dedicated to buffering.

If there are limits on concurrent connections, why would I want Oracle instead of other databases?

Oracle offers a lot of benefits over other databases, but it's not for everyone. Consider the following benefits of Oracle:

• High data integrity.
• Better Web performance.
• True scalability, including the ability to move from Shared, to Dedicated, to Clustered servers as your needs grow.
• Mission-critical recovery services such as Point-In-Time Recovery of any data object.