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The premise of this document is to provide reader with ideas on how to manage a growing number of reference databases as teams adopt Datical.

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Introduction

During early phase of Datical adoption, teams typically setup Reference Databases on their own, i.e., they may not be using centralized infrastructure from day 1. This allows teams flexibility to manage and configure their Reference Databases as well as underlying servers. However, as Datical usage grows, the approach above would create a sprawl of Reference Databases. To better manage sprawl, it would be ideal to move Reference Databases to centralized/shared infrastructure. 

Note that Reference Databases are typically structure-only databases without any significant amount of data. You may still need lookup data or test data to validate objects.

Reference Databases for SQL Server

You could put a large number of Reference Databases on single SQL Server instance. The number of Reference Database per instance would be dictated by the size of each Reference Database (size depends on number of objects in the database and the amount of data needed in the database).

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The best practice, however, for scaling out SQL Server-based Reference Databases would be to arrange separate servers for each version of SQL Server. And then run only one version of Database Engine (SQL Server instance) per server. It would be possible to set up multiple servers for the same version of Database Engine to support the case for database name collisions. 

Reference Database for Oracle 11g

An Oracle Reference Database is essentially one or more schemas in an Oracle instance.

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The best practice, for scaling out Oracle 11g based Reference Databases would be to setup one Oracle 11g instance per server and have separate servers for each Oracle 11g instance. In the example above, you would setup 5 servers, each with a single Oracle 11g instance. The number of Reference Database per Oracle 11g instance would be dictated by the size of each Reference Database (size depends on number of objects in the database and the amount of data needed in the database).

Reference Databases for Oracle 12c

Oracle 12c has the concept of pluggable databases (PDBs). A PDB is a portable collection of schemas, schema objects, and non-schema objects that appear to an Oracle Net client as a separate database. One or more PDBs together are called a container database (CDB).

Because each PDB is a separate database, you can configure all Reference Databases as PDBs on a single Oracle 12c container. The number of PDBs (hence number Reference Databases) per Oracle 12 container would be dictated by the size of each Reference Database (size depends on number of objects in the database and the amount of data needed in the database). Creating a PDB is very similar to creating a database instance in 11g from a resource standpoint (i.e., memory, storage, processes – although some are shared at the container level). Managing large number of Reference PDBs presents the same challenges as sprawl proliferation mentioned in the Introduction section above, except they would be more concentrated with the container concept.

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