First, let me start off with a hearty thanks to John (@jpiwowar) for his help with my n00bism, a.k.a. Part 6 in this series.
Also, thanks to those of you with DBA skills out there for not flaming me for my lack thereof. Part 6 was a bit of a disaster, but thanks to John and Time Machine, I can travel back in time and remedy all the harm I did last week.
Frankly, this part should really be rolled into Part 3 as the final step, i.e. setting up your brand new database, and apologies that this is turning into an opus.
I suppose I could have done it in fewer posts, but I wanted to chronicle the entire process start to finish in consumable pieces (vs. mondo posts), even the parts where I went off the tracks. Anyway, when it’s finally over, I’ll highlight the important parts.
So, first things first, I rolled back to the last Time Machine backup before I hosed everything up, which was right after I finished installing WebLogic in Part 5.
Then, I took John’s advice and created a script with all the Oracle database environment variables to run when I startup a session.
[oracle@theappslab-oel-vm ~]$ cat 11gdb.env
#!/bin/bash
export ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
export ORACLE_HOME=${ORACLE_BASE}/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1
export PATH=${ORACLE_HOME}/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${ORACLE_HOME}/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
[oracle@theappslab-oel-vm ~]$ . 11gdb.env
[oracle@theappslab-oel-vm ~]$ echo $ORACLE_HOME
/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1
Next, I ran dcma (Database Creation Assistant). I know it’s not terribly interesting to see all the steps in yet another wizard, but for posterity’s sake, here goes. Hang in there.
With past experience as a guide, I decided to stick with the defaults as much as possible.
Only 11 more steps to go.
Can’t go wrong with defaults, I hope.
I strayed away from the oldie but goodie “oracle” here. Too bad theappslab is 10 characters. You’ll see why in a bit.
Ah-ha, that’s where you define Enterprise Manager stuff. Then, I hit an error on this step.
Doh. Never fear, I’ll just pause and run netca before continuing. Oh, and by the way, the command is actually “netca”, not capitalized.
And here we go into another wizard. This one is pretty quick.
And we’re done. We now join your regularly-scheduled dbca, already in progress. Where were we?
Ah yes, here are all those account credentials I need for RCU. Excellent.
Nothing fancy here.
Flash recovery sounds way more advanced that what I need.
Don’t need any of this, since RCU will do this for me.
The All Initialization Parameters button opens a nice, single window view of all the parameters, which is very helpful.
The file location variables are good to have in one place. Back to my point about “theappslab” being ten characters. The DB_UNIQUE_NAME variable has an old-school eight character limit, so I’ll need to remember that its value is “theappsl”. Bummer.
The last step before the progress bar. Exciting. Clicking Finish actually offers the sweet option to save all this information in an HTML file. Great for me, since I tend to skip over this type of information without documenting it.
Then, it’s on to the progress bar.
I showed 85% here for a reason. If you’re paying close attention, you might notice that the screenshots start out saying “Step X of 12” and then switch to “Step X of 11”. That’s because I did this twice.
The first time, I got the Flash Recovery step, which was missing the second time. I didn’t notice until after, so I’m not sure what I did differently.
The first time, the progress bar hummed along until it hit 85%. Then it hung for a really long time, during which Time Machine kicked in, slowing everything to a crawl. Ack, maybe I did need 1 GB of RAM after all.
After 30 or so minutes, I finally bailed out of dbca, stopped the VM, doubled the RAM, rolled back with Time Machine and ran dbca again, and it happened again. I did some digging and found this happened to other people. I guess some script was hanging or something.
Lucky for me, by the time I finished the research, the installer had finished.
Sweet. Now that I have a database, I can install the Fusion Middleware schemas with RCU. Onward into another wizard.
Actually, this is a good stopping point, since the next part will (ideally) be the installation of WebCenter. This was just a pitstop post, where I finished the configuration I should have done after installing 11g.
So, thanks to John for helping, and here’s to hoping the next part brings the saga closer to the end.
Thanks for hanging in there.
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