Sharing Oracle Home

[philthee]

Hi All.
Recently started a new job where they are running some oracle databases on Windows Server 2003 R2 64bit.

They want to consolidate some of their databases onto one of these servers. It appears to have enough resources to be able to cope when comparing what resources currently using.

My question is about sharing an oracle_home. On this new server there is already a production database running within a 10204 oracle_home.
The other prod db that will be moving there is also 10204 database.

Would you let them share the same oracle_home or would you give them seperate oracle homes?

They are vendor supplied databases so i don't know if/when they say a certain patch has to be applied might interfere with the other one.
On the other hand both are 10204 and it would keep things clean sharing the same oracle_home.

I've never been anywhere with prod databases sharing a host so not sure what would be best.
Any advice?

[gandolf989]

If more than one database shares an Oracle home, then when you patch one you patch them all. You can always create multilple listeners, but you need to patch all or nothing. Having said that, if you start wil one Oracle home, you can always add a new Oracle home at the same or a different release and start one of the two databases using the new Oracle home. So you might start with one Oracle home and when you need to add a new Oracle home, add it.

[philthee]

Makes sense, cheers!

[davey23uk]

or use one database and put them in different schema, no wasted resource then

[PAVB]

or use one database and put them in different schema, no wasted resource then

True if both "databases" share similar init.ora setup and backup/recovery strategy; a bonus would be if both "databases" have to communicate with each other.