How do I freaking scale Oracle?:

For the record, I’m a NoSQLer and a big data guy. After nearly 20 years of dealing with what I’ve come to refer to as “the beast” (aka Oracle), I’ve turned coat and decided I prefer solving the problem rather than mitigating it.

That said, many companies I work with have spent 20 years painting themselves into an Oracle corner. While they may have one eye on a brighter future, they still must ensure their Oracle database is high-performance and highly available — and scales as well as possible. Despite what you may read in NoSQL vendor marketing materials […], it is possible to scale Oracle.

There’s just one catch: Nothing I’m going to suggest costs less than my house for a nontrivial installation. Heck, when you include the hardware and data center resources, some cost more than my whole neighborhood

Go see the Oracle MAA for a lot more details.