Dear Group,
I am puzzled by the problem which is very interdisciplinary in nature.
I would like to seek your views on the same.

We have an application (a kind of middle ware) entrusted with
processing the messages. The current architecture uses the JDO for
data persistence (a design before 2004). Application is chatty in
nature and doing lots of lookup, updates etc. Now the application is
subjected to a large file and need to process approx. million
transactions and is facing scalability issues.

I am researching the options to improve the performance and exploring
the areas like

1. Replacement of JDO with any other tool which does persistence at
application level
2. Using the advanced features of Oracle (RAC, Grid Computing, Golden
Gate) and do away with the application level persistence

I have a strong conviction that advancement of Oracle in all these
years will give rise to technological obsolescence of application
persistence.

My questions
1. What new features in OracleDB should I look/research further to
expedite the processing
2. Is there any strong tried and tested third party tools for data
persistence
3. What are the key parameters should I look for while devising a
solutions (current data analysis - exisiting infra, hardware
improvements, memory improvements, optimization of queries etc.)

Any suggestions/pointers will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Yash