RE: Server Architecture

The pros and cons of this implementing an oracle home per database is the classic example of features vs. ease of maintenance argument and boils down to does one currently have a requirement which requires the additional features of having separate oracle homes. If not another oracle home could always be added later. The same applies to setting up the oracle home under another account.  

Ken Naim

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Tanel Poder
Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2008 11:10 AM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: RE: Server Architecture  

If you want fine grained accounting and resource scheduling for your instances on solaris 10 boxes, then the novel way would be using Solaris containers for Oracle. This is supported for non-RAC databases only though (AFAIK).   http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/db_in_containers.jsp

http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/consolidation/Containers_Oracle _041305.pdf  

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Regards,
Tanel Poder
http://blog.tanelpoder.com <http://blog.tanelpoder.com/>    

From: Tanel Poder [mailto:tanel.poder.003_at_mail.ee] Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 00:06
To: 'oracle-l_at_freelists.org'
Subject: RE: Server Architecture

One good reason for separate sets of binaries is patching and patch testing on one database without affecting others.  

Having all installations under different Unix users (and also groups in this case!) may be better for security but will make the everyday maintenance, refreshes etc probably harder... as you'll have various problems with permissioning and file access, need to constantly su between users, chmod/chown files etc... that's unless you want to chmod 777 all your directories & files, which would heavily go against the security principles again.  

I know quite many shops which use a separate software installation (and set of database directories) for each database and it works well. You need to do more manual work for applying patches for all software installations (unless you use automatic provisioning of some sort), but you win in flexibility to patch/upgrade only selected databased in the server instead of all.  

Regarding different users for each database - this may be useful if you want fine-grained separation of duties - by database. However this approach will be useless if all your DBAs have access to all accounts anyway, in this case you will just make your life harder without gaining any benefit. So you should figure out if you really need all your Oracle installations under different unix usernames and whether the benefit outweighs the maintenance overhead.    

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http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l Received on Thu Jan 03 2008 - 11:23:50 CST