Inspired by Frits Hoogland's excellent article on Oracle running in Docker , I started building a lot of Oracle containers. It's nice to have multiple different Oracle versions available at your fingertips for research, product testing and so on. However, one thing annoys me with Docker: if you want any usable IPC, you need to use --ipc=host . This means that all the images share the same namespace and, furthermore, when a container exits it sometimes does not clean up the IPC entries. As you probably know the IPC is used by Oracle for SGA memory and semaphore sets. It identifies which belong to which instance, by combining SID and ORACLE_HOME. This in turn means that you cannot run two databases with the same SID and ORACLE_HOME at the same time... which is usually fine, but not so with Docker and --ipc=host . In this case we do want to run multiple containers built off the same image, or perhaps have multiple similar images with the same ORACLE_HOME, differing in minor
I use this blog to publish the small bits I come accross when using the Oracle Database. It's the "every day I learn something new" style.