Re: Isolated databases or instances

On Fri, 2007-02-16 at 13:18, Henry, Nigel, CYFD wrote:
> We are at the beginning of the building of a 3-tier
> development/test/uat environment. We would like some advice on how
> the PostgreSQL database should be configured for this environment.
>
> The environments will be installed on three blades of an IBM Blade
> Center. Due to budget restrictions, we are building the three
> environments with separate install instances of the HTTP server
> (3) 1st blade; separate install instances of the application server
> (3) 2nd blade -- the HTTP server will be installed from the
> application build rather than as a separate install; and
> three PostgreSQL database instances on the last blade.
>
> My concern is that building the PostgreSQL databases as instances from
> a single binary could lead to problems in a development environment.
> My recommendation is to create three isolated databases (3
> binaries) for each environment to mitigate an unforeseen mishaps.
>
> I would like some advice on what would be the best practice for
> building a development environment, such as described above, in the
> type of environment described above.

What exactly are you trying to accomplish with multiple PostgreSQL
instances here? I can't see there being any great advantage to three
separate instances than having three discrete databases defined in one
instance. Use pg_hba.conf to restrict connections to the databases to
the proper users (testing, staging, and production, I assume) and you
should get the same effect with less complexity.

If you really need three discrete instances, you might want to look at
using vmware to set up three separate virtual machines, each with their
own IPs etc... on that one box.