Schemas / instances - question

We're considering migrating an application off the mainframe and are looking at Oracle and DB2.

The application in question currently runs on IDMS and has identical "schemas" which are segregated into different physical databases under the same DBMS. There is an IDMS technique which allows the program to, in essence, connect to the specific database it wants to using an input parm. There is never a need to process all the different instances in one run.

Is there a way to do this using Oracle? I vaguely remember schemas and instances but don't recall if they will allow what we want and if there's a way for a program to switch to a different occurrence of the database using a parm. We're also concerned with how the access is optimized, since the statistics for the database may be different (e.g. in one physical database the ration of departments to employees might be 1 to 1000, while another might have a ratio of 1 to 4).

Thanks Received on Fri Sep 28 2001 - 14:18:06 CDT