How to switch between multiple databases releases on Windows

Question:  I have an Oracle 10g and an Oracle 11g database on my Windows box and I want to be able to adjust my environment so that I can run either 10g or 11g.  How do you switch the environmental variables on a Windows server?

Answer:  Oracle has a "home selector" feature to allow you to change the environment between multiple $ORACLE_HOME directories, but is is just as easy to create a bat file for each oracle version to set the appropriate environment and execute it before executing sqlplus.

The key for accessing SQL*Plus is to have the $ORACLE_HOME/bin directory highest in the PATH and that will pick-up the appropriate release of Oracle.

Also see these notes on using multiple registry values for different releases of Oracle

Here is an example script to allow you to switch between Oracle 10g and Oracle 11g on a Windows box:

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