RE: Physical Design Question

[Mercadante, Thomas F]

Title: Physical Design Question

David,

 

You don't say but, I am assuming that all your databases are at the same Oracle Release level.  If this is the case, I would create one Oracle home for now - you can always create a new Oracle Home when you start considering migrating each individual database to a newer release.

 

You didn't say if each DB has different access loads, so assuming all are the same, I would share all disks with all DB's.  It will allow you to better blend all db's on the box - provide the best throughput possible.

 

That's what I would do, unless there are some specific business reasons to not do this (like contractual stuff about availabilty for one application that the other does not have).

 

Hope this helps.

Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional

-----Original Message-----
From: David Wagoner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2003 2:59 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: Physical Design Question

Here's my situation:

Damagement wants us to move 4 small production DBs to one server to save on licensing costs.  Server is a Sun E4500, 4 CPUs, 8 GB RAM.  There is a pair of internal disks that are mirrored with enough room for Solaris, swap, and 1 Oracle Home.  There are 3 A1000 disk arrays (12 x 18 GB drives each), all set to RAID 1+0 using the S.A.M.E. approach.

Questions:

1.  Should I use a separate Oracle Home for each DB? 

        Pros:   --Allows upgrade/patching of 1 DB at a time without affecting others (some are home-grown, some are 3rd party). 

        Cons:  --Takes up more space, but space is not a major concern.
                       --I'll have to put some Oracle Homes on the A1000s with the data files (i.e., concerns about disk contention).

                       --Requires applying multiple upgrades/patches

2.  Should I put 1 DB per A1000? (Actually, 1 A1000 would hold 2 of the least active DBs.)

        Pros:  --Easier to determine performance problems b/c each DB is isolated on 1 A1000.
                      --If one controller dies, it only affects 1 DB.

        Cons:  --Only get throughput of 1 controller; could use 3 controllers if data files spread across 3 A1000s.

Anyone with experience doing this, please share your tips, tricks, and gotchas!

Best regards,

David B. Wagoner
Database Administrator