Ok, first of I want to say that I have installed quite a couple of Oracle database releases and that I am not a newbie to this, but today I feel like one. Why? Well, simply put, I don’t understand how Oracle can release a product that is full of bugs and misplaced links. Anyhow, let’s get started:
Yesterday we thought of installing the latest and greatest Oracle database 11gR1 release on our brand new shiny Linux box. As always we are using the brilliant CentOS 5. We then went ahead and did step by step according to the installation instructions of this Oracle guide to install 11g on Linux.
All went fine until the Database Configuration Assistance came up with an error that it can not install properly. It also said that this is not so bad as one can run the installation manually later on. We have had these errors in the past and know how to handle them. Thus we continued. After that the database was setup fine.
Actually all went fine, we could login to the database without a problem and all is set. Well that means, the database was running, but no the listener! More to that later on.
We then configured the system to start the Oracle services automatically on reboot. For that we used another Oracle Guide that is supposed to state the correct settings. The problem is that it does NOT work as stated in their document!
First thing is to go into “# vi /etc/oratab” and edit the last line of the string to change it to a “Y” instead of the “N”. No problem, but it gets problematic when you are trying to use the “dbora” script. Because as soon as you are trying “/sbin/chkconfig –level 345 dbora on” (this has to be done on CentOS/RedHat) you will get an error like “service dbora does not support chkconfig”. How come?
To make the script “dbora” work on CentOS/RedHat you will want to include this at the top of the document:
#!/bin/sh
# chkconfig: 345 99 10
# description: Oracle auto start-stop script.
The important part here is to have the line “chkconfig” AND “description” in the file. Otherwise “chkconfig” will not work! Ok, on with the show.
Still after reboot the database does not come up as expected. Digging around some more, we found that the script “dbstart” has another bug. This line:
# First argument is used to bring up Oracle Net Listener
ORACLE_HOME_LISTNER=$1
does NOT work! As soon as one changes it to the actual path of the installation the script runs much better. So go ahead and change it to:
# First argument is used to bring up Oracle Net Listener
ORACLE_HOME_LISTNER=/opt/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1
Of course, our Oracle installation is under “/opt”, change this to your installation path. Some have posted in blogs and forums that you could also change it to “$ORACLE_HOME” but we have had no success with that only the hard coded path value does work.
Fun, isn’t it? But wait there is more and make sure to read until the end of this post. Next up is not really something that os Oracle’s fault, but never the less not stated anywhere. To make working in the shell more comfortable and that the scripts DO work you will want to modify your “profile” settings.
Fire up “vi” and edit “/etc/profile” and add the following lines (change it to fit your path and SID):
PATH=$PATH:/opt/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/bin
ORACLE_HOME=/opt/oracle/product/11.1.0/db_1/
ORACLE_SID=orcl
export PATH USER LOGNAME MAIL HOSTNAME HISTSIZE INPUTRC ORACLE_HOME ORACLE_SID
Ok, after you have done all of the above you can safely restart your machine and your Oracle database should start automatically. If it does not then a “dbca” could help. but wait, I kept the best for the end!
In our installation we have found that with the scripts above any local login to the sqlplus console reports us that we are connected to an idle instance! But, now get this, my users can login to the database with SQL-Developer or any remote client!!! Don’t believe us, here is the screen shot of the local login:
Only this “little” thing kept us quite busy for today and it is leaving a feeling that Oracle database 11gR1 might not be so ready for big time yet. But maybe we are doing something wrong? Let us know, we are welcome to suggestions.
