I have a new database administrator who is proposing combining the great plains databases with our other production databases. I'm wondering what the recommendations or best practices are for this? He says that if we just put the databases on it and run the great plains client on a separate server that we won't have to restart the SQL services or server to apply the patches even though there are update scripts the run in the great plains updates.
My concerns are if we apply patches to great plains we'll have to reboot these services which will require me to coordinate updates with the entire division versus just my great plains users if I keep them separate. Another concern is security, I've always beleived in segregating financial data from production data. One of our great plains representatives suggested at a bare minimum to have the Great Plains databases on separate Sql instance but my DBA says that having to instances of SQL will cause them to continually fight one another for resources. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.