IT Trends

Georgian College Moves to Oracle Database Cluster

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/08/10

Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario has gone public with a 2009 upgrade to its databases into a clustered environment to improve the availability, performance, and scalability of its Oracle PeopleSoft applications. The new set-up runs a four-node Oracle database cluster on Dell Linux servers. The upgrade to a clustered database environment was part of a larger project to modernize IT systems that serve the college's seven campuses. Georgian has about 38,000 students and 1,700 staff.

"Reliability, performance, and scalability were deciding factors behind our decision to move to Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters," said Terry Speare, senior database administrator. "Now our PeopleSoft Enterprise applications are performing like a top. Our constituents are ecstatic with the application uptime and performance we're experiencing."

The college said its upgrade was intended to enhance the performance and uptime of its PeopleSoft 9.0 Enterprise applications, which include Campus Solutions, Financial Management, Human Capital Management, and others.

The Canadian institution migrated off of a legacy system that was expensive to maintain and that also couldn't keep up during periods of high transaction volume, such as student registration.

With the upgrade, the college said, its registrar office has experienced increased application performance and availability levels, enabling the office to cut its traditional registration period in half.