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Implementing Financials on a single instance

Carol Francum EXPERT RESPONSE FROM: Carol Francum

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QUESTION POSED ON: 24 October 2003
Can you discuss some of the challenges of implementing Oracle Financials 11i on a single instance (i.e. I have concerns with maintenance and patching)?

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You are right to have concerns.

I cannot recommend strongly enough that you rethink the idea of having only a single instance. If you implement your Applications suite on a single instance, you have no fall-back in case a patch or other user or developer action has unintended results.

Best practice is to have a minimum of three instances (development, test and production). The test instance will often double as a training instance. Oracle also suggests that you may want a standalone instance which is ONLY used by the DBA to validate that patches do not impact the system.

Ask yourself the question: What is the cost of having my applications down (and my users unable to work) on any given day? What is the cost to the business?

This may help you sell the cost of additional resources to your upline. You must have, at a minimum, two instances. Your support people should not be developing applications or scripts in your production instance.

That's what development or test is for. If you have customizations (and most applications have some small customizations) it is crucial to have a three-tier control (development, test, production).

Some businesses will try to get by with only two instances, and by rigorous control of what is promoted into production, they succeed. Only when a patch, custom form or report, or PL/SQL package have been tested by both the developer and a knowledgeable user to verify that the item works correctly is the change moved into (promoted) the production instance. Because of the inter-action between the Financials applications, it is all to easy for even the best of developers to implement code which has a side effect in another application.


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