Multiple installations of Oracle on the same developmental box ???

[Henrique Silva_3]

We got this A Class server HPUX 11 64 bit, that will be our developmental box, and I would like to install Oracle 8i, 32 bit ( current app runs on that ), 64 bit, and Oracle 91 64 bit.

Anyways, can anyone point me to any set of docs that will talk about what I should watch for ? I do not think all instances would be running at the same time, but, it does not hurt to set up as such, just in case.

Thanks,

Henrique Silva

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Actually, you can do this without any problem.
You can have multiple instances on 9i and 8i running at the same time as long as there are separate ORACLE_HOMES and each has a unique Oracle SID. You can even have multiple listeners running so long as the port numbers do not conflict. I do this all the time on Development boxes and Sandboxes.

[Dennis J Robinson]

Install can be so your differing ORACLE_HOME's are as such:

/u01/app/oracle/8.1.7-64bit
/u01/app/oracle/8.1.7-32bit
/u01/app/oracle/9i

Dennis

[Andreas D. Skjervold]

Hi

Install the different Oracle versions in separate homes:
/oracle/product/8.1.7
/oracle/product/8.1.7_64
/oracle/product/9.0.1

and make sure (using script or different users) that your enviroment settings gets right depending on version:
- ORACLE_HOME
- PATH
- ORA_NLS33
- ORACLE_BASE
- LD_LIBRARY_PATH
- ORACLE_PATH
- SHLIB_PATH

and ofcourse ORACLE_SID nameing the instance.

Andreas

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Henrique,

Also make sure your /etc/oratab file correctly refers to the different ORACLE_HOMEs

Something else to consider when running multiple Oracle instances on the same system (even if they are all running the same Oracle version) is to create and oracle user 'per instance' e.g. If I have 3 instances called dev, qas, and prd I would have three users:

user oradev group dba
user oraqas group dba
user oraprd group dba

This makes life a lot easier when maintaining the databases e.g If an instance crashes and leaves behind IPC resources, its much easier to identify which resources to 'ipcrm'.

HTH

Duncan