[btilly]

True.

But my experience with Oracle specifically is that handling connections is just general overhead, while the real failure modes have to do with overloading random latches somewhere deep inside of the system. I also found that logic in stored procedures caused us to hit limits faster than leaving it in the application.

The specific case I saw this in was a simple set of queries to test if you were in an A/B test, and if not to assign you to a random variant. After I left my application logic was moved into a complex stored procedure, and they then had scalability limitations that they didn't have before. For political reasons they declared success and ran fewer A/B tests...

(I've used a lot of other databases as well, but Oracle is the only one I've really pushed to its scalability limits.)