Running SQL and Oracle on the same server?

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Running SQL and Oracle on the same server?

Karthika Raman

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Points: 2520
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May 9, 2006 at 7:57 am

#112892

I know that this is primarily a SQL server group, but I am hoping someone has experience in running Oracle alongside SQL servers. We currently only have SQL server installations in our organization. However one of our department is considering buying a third-party application that runs on Oracle. We are interested to find out any problems that people might have experienced in such an environment. I am doing some research on this subject to find out what I can, but I thought I would look to the experts on this.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

KR

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Lowell SSC Guru Points: 323518 More actions · Answer 1

In our shop, we have an application that uses either a SQL Server or Oracle database. As a result, we have lots of dev servers with SQL or oracle, or dev machines with both SQL and Oracle installed. we have oracle 8 and oracle 10G in this shop.

As a general rule, we have more headaches with Oracle; SQL server is really data centric, and users are given access to the data; Oracle is user centric, where the data is always related to a user, and then additional users can be given access to the data via grants and synonyms.

As a developer, i have both SQL 2000 and Oracle 8 installed on my machine and they coexist happily. oracle 10 we've always installed on a separate machine. if you were going to have a lot of traffic, we have one server with both SQL Server and oracle on it, with 4 procs and 4 gigs of ram, and we see some major performance issues whenever oracle is restoring a database; but normal usage we don't seem to see a performance hit.

The restoration process is much slower in oracle ; for SQL Server, restoring a 1 GIG backup might take a minute or two; it is very streamlined; For oracle, it takes a full hour; plus before you can restore you have to make sure you've created the user, roles and have the exact same names for table spaces that exists in the dump file; that in itself can take a while to investigate and create.

SQL Server requires less babysitting; ALL of our clients with Oracle have Oracle DBA's to administer/tune/backup/maintain their oracle dbs; many clients using SQL server often can have their network administrator handle the SQL server maintinance, if they do not have a dedicated DBA, so I'd say it costs an extra person to handle the oracle side of it. We have an inhouse DBA with oracle experience just because of the little nuances of headaches Oracle gives us;

that's just us, your milage may vary, but i hope it adds some insight.

Lowell

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Karthika Raman SSCrazy Points: 2520 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks so much! Valuable information that I can take to our discussion table.

KR

Rudyx - the Doctor SSC-Forever Points: 43695 More actions · Answer 3

I'd opt for separation. We are primarily a SQL Server shop but we also have Oracle (7, 8 & 9) and UDB2 v7.x and a bunch more 'stuff'. We follow the standard that a SQL Server or Oracle Server or UDB2 Server is a 'dedicated' machine. So we do not share either multiple DBMS systems on a server or multiple applications on an application server. As for the amount of TLC these DBMSs need ... Well ... Oracle is a very 'needy' thing - a very big reason to separate it on it's own database server. UDB2 is 'needy' and MS/SQL very hands off. Also, Oracle has the tendency to really 'muck' with your registry. I have not seen a very clean un-installation or upgrade for this product. Try an uninstallatino on a test machine and then start scanning the registr - it leaves behind a real mess. As a database and server administrator this is another big reason to isolate Oracle to it's own server.

RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."

gcp777 Ten Centuries Points: 1059 More actions · Answer 4

I'd agree with the other posters - you can do it, but you should be a little cautious.

I'd have no issue doing this on a development server where performance is not a major issue.

For a production system, I'd really have a dedicated Server for each one, unless this Oracle application has a very small footprint.

Your main issue on a shared server will be making sure there are sufficient resources (RAM, disk, CPU) to run both Oracle and SQL Server without undue impact to the system.

Oracle is also usually more labour-intensive than SQL Server for most DBA housekeeping things (e.g. Backups.restores etc).