Oracle10G Binary Installation
In my last blog, I discussed the Oracle10G media and documentation. Let's continue our examination of Oracle10G with a few quick notes on our Oracle binary installation. In the past, installing Oracle used to be "a pain." Actually describing it as "a pain" is being considerate. I've spent more than a few hours of my career muttering under my breath and taking the installer's name in vain.
I remember the good old days. Installations used to take hours and experiencing problem after problem was commonplace. Successfully installing Oracle became a rite of passage as a DBA. With each new release, the installer became easier to use, installation speeds increased and the number of installation problems decreased. In a few years, I'll be telling new DBAs "You don't know how good you have it. I remember when installations used to take three days... We were real DBAs back then. We even had to log in at NIGHT TIME to do work."
We have installed 10G on AIX, HP and one of our ace developers, Jason Heese, has it up and running on LINUX Redhat. All of the installations went well. The 10G installer is easier to use, has less screens and is more intelligent than previous versions. The 10G executables consume less space than their 9I counterparts. On AIX Release 5.2 (our operating system of choice), 9.2.0.6 consumed 4 GIGs of disk space while a comparable installation of 10.1.0.3 on the same box consumed a little under 3.5 GIGs of disk. Oracle10G consumed 3 GIGs of disk on our HP test platform and 2 GIGs on LINUX.
Installation Hints and Tips
The most important thing to remember is to use the installation manual like a cookbook. Follow the steps that Oracle recommends and DO NOT DEVIATE from them. The installation guide is your friend and if you don't understand some of the operating system commands provided in the manual, make friends with your local O/S administrator.
You'll also need to find out the prerequisites for your system. Instead of me repeating reams of information that not everyone wants to read, let me tell you where to look. Log on to Oracle Metalink (if you don't have an account, you'll need your CSI Number to create one) and do a search using the following keywords "pre-install checks for 10g RDBMS XXXX'. Just replace the 'XXXX' with your operating system and you'll find the "prereqs" for it. Don't have a CSI number yet? Never fear, the documentation is also available on Oracle's Technet website (http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/database10g.html). Remember, you also have to create an account on Technet but it's free! It's a great deal too. Technet has articles, white papers, discussion forums and product and documentation download areas. Even if you have found the prereqs for your operating system on Metalink, there is information on Technet that is required reading before you begin your install. After you log on to Technet, make sure you read the "Oracle Database Installation Guide for XXXX Systems' and "Oracle Database Release Notes 10g for XXXXX'. Just replace the 'XXXX' with your operating system.
Once you are finished reading the suggested documentation, you can be really proactive and go back to Metalink and do a search for "10G installation problems XXXX". Once again, replacing the 'XXXX' with your operating system. That way you'll make sure there are no hidden bugs for your particular operating system release.
Common Installation problems
Most installations fail because of a few common issues:
- Insufficient disk space - Check the installation guide before you start the install. If you are going to create a starter database during the install, make sure you have enough disk space available. Oracle10G requires up to 4 GIGs of disk space for the binaries alone. Some windows installations may have a slightly smaller footprint, but not by much. For UNIX systems, the Oracle Universal Installer requires up to 600 MB of space in the /tmp directory.
- Improper permissions - The installation guide details the security permissions required to do a successful install.
- UNIX/LINUX - Shared memory and semaphore parameters. The system configuration file (/etc/system in the many UNIX systems) contains parameters used to configure shared memory parameters and semaphores.
Next Up
We'll discuss some new 10G parameters, discontinued parameters and the DDL for our first 10G database create.
