Benefits of Single Tenant Deployments

While presenting at a database event, I had a question from one of the attendees on benefits of running Oracle databases in Single Tenant Configuration.  I thought this would be a nice if I post it on my blog as it would benefit others too.

From Oracle documentation, “The multitenant architecture enables an Oracle database to function as a multitenant container database (CDB) that includes zero, one, or many customer-created pluggable databases (PDBs). A PDB is a portable collection of schemas, schema objects, and non-schema objects that appears to an Oracle Net client as a non-CDB. All Oracle databases before Oracle Database 12c were non-CDBs”.

Following are the benefits of running databases in Single Tenant Configuration:

1. Alignment with Oracle’s new multi-tenant architecture
2. Cost saving. You save on license fee as single tenant deployments do not attract Multi-tenant option license fee. License is applicable should you have two or more PDBs.
3. Upgrade/patch your single PDB from 12.1.0.1 to 12.x easily with reduced downtime
4. Secure separation of duties (between CDBA & DBA)
5. Easier PDB cloning

I would recommend running all your production and non-production databases in single-tenant configuration (if you are not planning for consolidation using multi-tenant option) once you upgrade them to Oracle Database 12c. I expect to see single tenant deployments become the default deployment model for the customers.