Re: Multiple Homes & Oracle Patch Testing

Hi Karsten,

Thanks for the reply. Perhaps I did not explain myself very well, plus I misunderstand the Oracle multi-home concept. I certainly don't want to run different versions of Oracle on one box. Just multiple installs of the same oracle version. One would be a production, the other home install to be used to test among other things Oracle patch releases. The following is from the Oracle 8i install document:

"Using multiple Oracle homes and OFA provides many advantages when administering large databases. The following advantages are the most important:

Databases are easier to administer because of the structured organization of directories and files, and the consistent naming used for database files.

A reduction of performance bottlenecks and improved safeguards against disk failures, because input/output (I/O) can be distributed across a number of disks.

**Software upgrades can be tested in an Oracle home in a separate directory from the Oracle home where your production database is located. "

The last paragraph above is what I'm interested in, does this concept work well in practice? If not then I'd want to do the Oracle patch testing on a completely separate box.

Glen Moffitt

Karsten Farrell <kfarrell_at_medimpact.com> wrote in message news:<hRDt9.28$WV1.4688911_at_newssvr13.news.prodigy.com>...
> You need to remember that there are two parts to an Oracle installation.
> There's the database software and there are the database data files. The
> software is what you put in %ORACLE_HOME%. Usually, it's not a good idea
> to put your data files under %ORACLE_HOME% (for the very reason you
> state ... maintenance when you patch or upgrade your software).
>
> So if you have some Oracle8 software, it will be in one directory path
> (oracle home) - eg, c:\oracle\ora806. If you later install Oracle8i
> software, it will be in a different directory path (oracle home) - eg,
> c:\oracle\ora81. It goes on like this as you install each new version
> (or in some cases, the Oracle installer will create multiple directory
> trees because they haven't upgraded all the software to the current
> version - eg, Oracle 9iAS installs some 8.0 software in a separate home).
>
> Now the second part is your database data files. You might have them all
> stored under the same directory path - eg, c:\oradata\PROD and
> c:\oradata\MIRROR and c:\oradata\TEST and c:\oradata\HIST. If you have
> multiple disks on your Win2k server, you would spread some of the data
> files out for performance reasons.
>
> You choose (with some very real limitations) which oracle home you want
> to use to access any of your databases. You do this by refining your
> PATH environment variable to choose from which 'bin' directory to
> execute Oracle software. Part of the Oracle install adds a menu item to
> your Start menu to change oracle homes.
>
> There's a lot more to this picture, but I hope this gets you started.
Received on Wed Oct 23 2002 - 22:28:34 CDT