Oracle 10g Installation and upgrade tips

Installing & Upgrading Oracle10g.

- The most common Oracle10g installation can be performed with just one CD.

- On Linux and Unix you may use the runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs flag to continue with the Oracle install even if the flavor of Linux is not certified by Oracle.

- Starting 10g the Oracle client can only be installed from a separate CD.

- Personal Edition is only available for Windows and does not include RAC.

- If you choose a started database based in one if the schemes available (Transaction processing, General Purpose or Data Warehouse) DBCA will run in no interactive mode, if you use advance it will run in interactive mode.

- Database Control (EM) is installed by default if you install a preconfigured database, for custom you have the option not to install it.

- OUI allows you to choose 3 types of storage File system, ASM and Raw devices.

- If you choose ASM and an ASM instance is not installed already Oracle will create one for you.

- In 10g you may enable automatic database backup during install using the backup and recovery options screen.

- The default disk quota for Flash back is 2GB.

- While installing you have the option to provide separate password for each administrative user or provide one password for all.

- The EM Webstage and Apache, which were installed with Oralce9i, are not longer installed with the Oracle10g.

- In 10g the disk requirements for install are now less.

- The installation is simplified, you can install the software and create the database just with the default settings.

- Oracle10g requires a minimum of 512MB minimum for an instance with database control and 256MB without database control and about 2.5GB HD.

- The Oracle10g Companion CD includes:
- Database examples.
- JPublisher.
- Legato.
- Natively compiled Java libraries.
- Oracle text-supplied knowledge bases.
- Oracle HTTP Server (Different Oracle Home).
- Oracle Apex (Different Oracle Home).

Configuring Oracle 10g.

- 10g includes a new SYSAUX tablespace to store all auxiliary metadata.

- DBCA can setup the flash recovery area, clone a database, setup Database control and grid control, register automatically LDAP, implement backup and recovery, create management repository and services.

- Cloning a database using DBCA templates saves time in database creation, because copying an already created seed database's files to the correct location takes less time than creating them.

- DBCA Templates are stored in $ORACLE_HOME/assistants/dbca/templates directory, they can be easily shared and can be copied from one machine to another.

- There are 2 types of templates seed and nonseed, seed templates have the extension .dbc and include the data files of an existing database. Nonseed templates has the extension .dbt and does not include data files.

- When creating a database template for cloning DBCA will shutdown the database and start it in mount state.

- In 10g the instance parameters are categorized into basic and advanced, in most of the cases modification of the basic parameters is enough to setup and tune the database.

- The compatible parameter is irreversible, once you set it you can no change it's value to one that is less than the previous value. To lower the value you will need to do a point in time recovery of the databases.

- Have you ever wonder how Oracle knows if you are using or not some of the enterprise features of the license?. What about Looking here

SQL> l 1 select name, detected_usages DU, last_usage_date 2 from dba_feature_usage_statistics 3* where currently_used = 'TRUE'

- If you want to know the high watermark usage of various attributes such as number of tablespaces, concurrent connections, number of user indexes, etc. Then this is the query you need.

SQL> l 1* select NAME, VERSION, HIGHWATER, LAST_VALUE, DESCRIPTION from dba_high_water_mark_statistics SQL>

If you don't see the information populated in the table all you have to do is execute the following package.

exec dbms_stats.gather_database_stats

- Oracle 10g provides a utility script $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/ultu10i.sql to perform pre-upgrade validation on the database to be upgraded. DBUA will also automatically run this tool. This scripts needs to be run as SYSDBA before you plan to perform a manual upgrade.

- Oracle uses the DBMS_REGISTRY package to determinate the objects to be upgrades. In 10g the cmpdbmig.sql script determinate which components are in the database by performing specifics callouts to the components REGISTRY. Versions of Oracle prior to 9.2 does not have components REGISTRY in this case the upgrades automatically creates and populates the component REGISTRY. You can query the components using the view DBA_REGISTRY.

- If you get any errors during the upgrade "Manually only" the utl101s.sql scripts provides the name of specific scripts to run to fix the failed component.

- Run the script $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin/utlrp.sql at to end to recompile all objects.