I've been given the task of researching the best possible configuration for running 30 databases on one machine in terms of performance, etc.

What we have now is 30 database instances with 6 instances running per machine on 5 different machines. Each instance is a replica of a production instance for our state-wide student records system and contains around 1625 tables with millions of rows. We have decided that the replica (which is used for reporting and ad hoc queries) really only needs to contain about 350 of those 1625 tables because the others aren't used for reporting so we were hoping to move them all onto one box.

I'm at a loss for where to begin to do the research on what the best configuration for this set up would be - some of the questions I have are
1) could we put them all into one instance and use row level security to give access to each school?
2) should we up them in one instance but have one schema per school?
3) should we have 30 instances?
4) would streaming in 10g (which I know nothing about) be of benefit
etc, etc.

Does anyone have a suggestion for how one would begin to get answers to such questions (I probably have 100 which I will spare you by not listing here).


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