Maximum number of service in a database?

Question

Somebody can tell me if there is a maximum number of service I can use in a database? Those services are create with dbms_service or "srvctl add service" or dbca. Those services are set in the database parameter SERVICE_NAME automatically by the Clusterware or manually if it is not a cluster database.
Thank,
GG

Answer 1

I would tend to be suspicious just because 50 services is quite a lot. If you really have 50 distinct applications and you want to manage 50 different services, 50 different TNS aliases, etc. you certainly can. But most organizations aren't going to see a lot of benefit from having that many services and may end up spending a lot of time micro-managing things the system unnecessarily.
You would generally have separate services if you wanted to have different services on different nodes of the cluster (i.e. create a reporting service on a subset of the nodes of the cluster for reporting work so that doesn't get comingled with the OLTP workload on the other nodes). It would be rather hard to manage 50 services on the same cluster effectively-- you'd either have all 50 services spread across all the nodes, in which case there would be little benefit to having all those services, or you'd have something like 5 services on each of 10 nodes which would tend to result in poor load balancing (assuming the load profile of each application is rather variable) or lead to constant administrative "futzing" to improve load balancing.
Justin