Andreas' Adventures

Sometimes error messages are very misleading. If you see an error stating: Exception in thread "main" you expect that this is some java-related issue. Maybe the classpath is wrong, your JAVA_HOME is not set, etc. I had this error when I was starting up the Oracle dbca. After some checks and different tries I found out that the DISPLAY environment was set, but to a different screen, which I was not using. So even when you check the dbca shell script, you will find a build-in check for the DISPLAY environment. But now the check passed with flying flags - as it was set. The problem that my dbca was unable to use this DISPLAY lead to the java error. Setting the DISPLAY to the one I was using (and setting xhost to allow all) solved this.

Found out that the DBCA does not create a specific ARCH location when you do not use the default one. When you are in the dbca and edit the init parameter So after my nice little database was frozen I created the arch directory in the ASM and voila, everything was back to normal.

I thought that using the Oracle Enterprise Linux for the 11g would be a pretty cool idea. Actually the installation experience is not different from a normal RH ES version. I would have thought that a couple of necessary packages were already included (unixODBC, libaio, etc) but I guess that this is the age-old problem of having the OS out there for some time when the software (DB) is still in development. It would be awesome if Oracle would come up with a intermediate release of the OEL when they bring out a new version of the DB or the AS (yes I like to daydream :-) When installing the software no issues were detected. However when I build the Database (dbca) it seemed to hang at 45%. I retried three times (sample schemas on/off). Then I left it running while I was having lunch. And guess what: it just takes a little bit longer. So when installing 11g just bring a little bit of patience with you.