RE: What are the implications of having several instances on a se rver sharing the oracle home?

Sounds lik an old mainframer talking? Nah. I'm an old mainframer, and even in my mainframe days, when I thought IBM OS-360 was the only real computing, I never thought that way. Sounds more like a techncally illertatre manager who knows just enough to be dangerous.

Ed Stevens

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From: Mercadante, Thomas F [mailto:thomas.mercadante_at_labor.state.ny.us] Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 1:26 PM To: 'achoto_at_american.edu'; oracle-l_at_freelists.org Subject: RE: What are the implications of having several instances on a se rver sharing the oracle home?

Ana,

There are at least two things to consider.

If all of your applications are home grown, then sharing one Oracle home is appropriate. The implication here is that when you choose to migrate to a new version of the database software, that all of these database can go at the same time.

If your application are store-bought, then you have another thing to worry about. Typically, store-bought applications will declare capatability with the Oracle level at different times. In this case, I would think you would want different Oracle homes.

In all cases, I have never heard of (nor *every* worry about) binary contention issues between databases. This is a new one on me. Sounds like an old main-framer talking!! :)

Good Luck!

Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional

-----Original Message-----

From: Ana Choto [mailto:achoto_at_american.edu] Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 2:13 PM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: What are the implications of having several instances on a server sharing the oracle home?

My boss thinks that this could cause problems. I say it's OK to have, say three Oracle instances (or more) sharing the binaries, as long as we have enough memory and space. He thinks we should install the software for each instance to alleviate contention for the binaries. Space is not an issue for him. The problem with this setting is that I will have to apply patches to all of them.

I have on a server four databases, three of them share the binaries, they are on 9iR2, and I also have a 10G instance on its own oracle home. The 9i DBs are not heavily used so I can't tell if there is performance issues with them. I don't see a problem with the 10G db, although no one but me is using it.

On another server I have three databases in their own oracle home. Two instances run on 8.1.7.4, one is the datawarehouse and the other one is oltp. No performance problems there. Another oltp database (9iR2) resides on the server, and I don't see any performance issues there either.

Is someone out there willing to share his/her experiences with any of these settings?

Thanks

Ana E. Choto
American University
e-Operations - Information Technology
Phone (202) 885-2275
Fax (202) 885-2224

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Wed Sep 29 2004 - 13:45:18 CDT