11g admin – Chapter 2 installing

installing the database is relatively simple. The lab corresponding to this chapter is relatively simple. The installer helps you walk through the installation and does a relatively good job of catching problems or issues. When I installed the product using the lab configuration, nothing went wrong. I selected the basic install and did not configure a sample database. When I installed it in a VMWare instance, I had more problems. I did need to configure a few kernel parameters, swap space, accounts, groups, and rpm packages. A good tutorial on preparing the Linux operating system can be found at http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/11gr1_db/install/oel5gainst/oel5gainst.htm. This give you a good screen by screen configuration on getting the operating system ready for the database. A good tutorial on installing the database can be found at http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/11gr1_db/install/dbinst/dbinst.htm which shows how to install Enterprise Edition. This is a Linux specific installation and shows screen by screen on how to install the database.

Some of the commands that I needed to know in Linux to get this working were:

  • swapon, dd, and mkswap – I needed to add swap space because I did not prepare it properly
  • rpm -ivh – I did not install the libaio-devel package properly. I had to go back and install it.
  • ifconfig – I needed to change the network from dhcp to static ip address. This was caught during the installation.
  • vi /etc/sudoers – I wanted to add oracle to the sudoers list so I could record what was executed for the install
  • mount and umount – so that I could mount and unmount the Linux media and database media

Overall, this was relatively simple to make work. The most difficult issues were getting the operating system ready for the installation. Fortunately, the installer guided me to what was needed and I could search the internet on how to do things like adding swap or assigning static IP addresses.

The actual installation process consists of three steps in the class

  1. oraInstall – install the software without a sample database
  2. netca – configure a default listener
  3. dbca – configure a generic database with unicode character support and a custom SGA and PGA size. The size recommended in the lab was SGA:404 and PGA:150. Other than this everything else is defaults.