Andreas' Adventures

Yesterday I did my first ever silent install. Nothing fancy yet. There are two possibilities: a) Silent install is dead slow or b) There is something wrong with the machine or the storage Bottom line is, it took me 1.5 hours to just install the database software. I need to investigate this, as this is not what I had in mind. Continuing now with the listener and the dbca in a silent manner.

I am busy installing the latest version of the Oracle Enterprise Manager. Obviously I need a database for this. In order to protect my resources in the Oracle VM image that use I switched off all extra Database options. Among others the Partitioning option is offered. Well - during the installation of the OEM I found out the hard way that the Partitioning option is required for the database. I know that the OEM creates a lot of partitions - which will then get emptied during the data consolidation process. I happened to forget this. The funny thing is that the OEM installer checks this and comes back with a warning box, stating: Using the Partitoning option is strongly recommended. Being a wise guy I tried to ignore this. But when Oracle says that they STRONGLY RECOMMEND something they mean it. So I am deinstalling and reinstalling the database software as I write this ;-)

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.

Ok, I promise I will take more time to read things like manuals and other documents when it comes to new features in the database. Take the Flashback Recovery Area (FRA). Oracle does store archive logs in there, which is cool as it speeds up the recovery. The bad thing is that the Oracle Database behaves like a small child. When you do not look it will do strange things. So I was busy setting up the online backup of an infrastructure database. This one is still in 10.1.x while all the others in this environment are on 10.2.x . For the RMAN I have a catalog (also 10.2.x) so I had some problems with the versions as the 10.1.x database refused to get into the 10.2.x RMAN catalog. I thought that I have plenty of space for the archivelogs in the ASM (everything was RAC of course). I turned my attention to some other issues (aka not watching your kid for a moment). Then during an important demo for the client a developer told me that he cannot use the OID. Of course I checked, but the OID wa...