Very Computer

I am looking for some help in setting up an Oracle system. We are
running Oracle 7 on DOS/Windows, under Novell Netware 3.12. Our
applications are to be developed in Oracle Forms, Report Writer,
and SQL Plus.

For our working environment, I need to set up the database and
applications so that we have two or three "copies" of the database,
one for testing, one for training, and one for production.

The application code should be the same for all three environments,
and the user should be able to specify at logon (connect) time which
region he or she wants access to.

As I understand things, under Novell I can only have a single
database instance (and I'd probably only want one anyway). I
therefore need to set this up within a single database.

I have had a number of ideas on how I could do this, using different
user names for the various regions, or using views or synonyms in
some way, but all my ideas seem too complex. I heard a suggestion
that you can use tablespaces to do this (one tablespace for each of
test, training and production) but I don't see how, and I cannot get
back to the source of the suggestion.

Can anybody help me? I am new to Oracle, and therefore don't have the
experience of what seems to me to be a "standard" problem for DBAs,
but we have to have systems up and running ASAP, so any advice would
be appreciated.

(Come to that, any advice for a new oracle DBA, which would help me
to avoid time-consuming pitfalls, would be much appreciated!)

Thanks in advance,

Paul Moore.
--

------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------------

: I am looking for some help in setting up an Oracle system. We are
: running Oracle 7 on DOS/Windows, under Novell Netware 3.12. Our
: applications are to be developed in Oracle Forms, Report Writer,
: and SQL Plus.

: For our working environment, I need to set up the database and
: applications so that we have two or three "copies" of the database,
: one for testing, one for training, and one for production.

: The application code should be the same for all three environments,
: and the user should be able to specify at logon (connect) time which
: region he or she wants access to.

: As I understand things, under Novell I can only have a single
: database instance (and I'd probably only want one anyway). I
: therefore need to set this up within a single database.

We have separate instances for development (inc testing)
                               user training (& final testing)
                               production.
I'm not a DBA so..
                but I can't imagine doing it any other way than with
separate db instances. I'd also suggest different login for training,
production etc (in production each user has there own logon, in
training you only need an id for each 'role' for simulation) -
otherwise some users will get confused about which database there on
and find they have entered a whole lot of data only to realise they
were on the training system!
you need to be clear about testing versus training - you did not
mention development?
what about when you want to upgrade the oracle toolkit? - if you have
separate instances you can do that for the dev.instance and see how
it goes while production chugs merrily along.
I *strongly* recommend if you are running packages to keep them in a
separate instance to in-house developments - we did not do this and
are now paying the price. (we run Oracle Financials which is only
supported on particular versions of the Oracle toolkit - we develop
our own apps, find a bug, Oracle say fixed in next ver, but we can't
upgrade because the package is not supported on later ver - catch 22)

--
Steve Corbett.                    vvv
                                 [. .]   "just one person's opinion"

Quote:> I'm not a DBA so..
>                 but I can't imagine doing it any other way than with
> separate db instances.

no no no NO NO NO!

Not only is this generally a bad idea, but it is not supported on a Novell
platform.  The best way to accomplish this --

Quote:> : For our working environment, I need to set up the database and
> : applications so that we have two or three "copies" of the database,
> : one for testing, one for training, and one for production.

is to simply set up three sets of table owners, and run the DDL scripts for
all three.  Logging on as the appropriate table owners will provide
independent access for each set of table structures and data.

If it is a requirement that the users log on as somebody other than the table
owners, then private synonym scripts should be set up to point them to the
appropriate tables.