Christo Kutrovsky presented on Pythian's experience with RAC and ASM configurations over 3 years of production use. Key lessons included: 1) A 2-node RAC requires a 3rd observer node to avoid split-brain issues during maintenance. 2) ASMLIB can cause issues if multipathing is present and devices are not configured properly. It is best to access disks directly without ASMLIB. 3) Restoring backups into the same ASM diskgroup as production can cause data corruption if the restore overwrites existing files. 4) Device naming conventions and spfile locations must be standardized across RAC nodes to avoid parameter conflicts. 5) Adding new