Re: Oracle Apps on a single NT/Win2K Server

Fact - I regularily have 3 Oracle instances (2x Oracle8i 8.1.7, 1x Oracle9i) up and running concurrently on my Pentium III, 800MHz, 512M RAM laptop. I use the laptop for demonstrations and get quite acceptable performance - for a single user. However, I certainly would not want this for production.

Fact - Many people confuse a schema, a database and an instance. Most 3rd party applications use 1 schema (per application). Without belabouring the point, as long as each application has a unique schema and each application runs on the same version of Oracle, you could probably set up all applications to run on one instance, thereby saving considerable amounts of memory and CPU cycles. (However, maintenance & admin might be impacted.)

Observation - Many organizations insist on putting an application and a database on the same box. For a variety of reasons, I find it is not optimum to try to tune a single box to handle both an application and a database.

Observation - With modern n-tier applications, it is usually more efficient to one box handle the database and a separate box handle the application tier. Therefore, the optimum configuration would be at least 2 (generally very small) machines per application. However, based on the second fact, you could probably collapse most, if not all the application data storage requirements to one machine, dedicated - and therefore tuned - to database useage.

In summary - you could probably put all the applications and their corresponding databases on a single Wintel box. However, you might not be happy about it when performance suffers.

Unfortunately, the only way to tell is to benchmark; most UNIX server vendors would be happy to loan machines for a few weeks to do such benchmarks, but I have not run across any Wintel server vendors who would do that.

"Ben H. Loosli" wrote:

> We had originally planned on installing 3-5 different applications on a
> single Wintel based server all being run against Oracle. One of our
> corporate system guys said that Oracle can only handle multiple apps on a
> Unix box, not Wintel. Is this really the case? Do we really need to purchase
> 5 Wintel servers to handle all of our Oracle based applications?
>
> --
> Ben Loosli
> looslib_at_cvn.net
Received on Fri Nov 16 2001 - 01:24:37 CST