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Oracle Tips by Burleson

Oracle Installation Guidelines

As stated in the introduction to this chapter, installation of Oracle is a complex topic. And though Oracle has automated the process to a large extent, if you don’t have your ducks in a row before you start, your success is doubtful. Therefore, this section will cover Oracle installation on NT, UNIX, and Linux, and attempt to point out the pitfalls that might trip you up on the path to a proper installation. Note, however, that the product is growing and changing with each release, so this information cannot, nor is it intended to, replace the installation guides provided by Oracle. Instead, this section is intended to provide general guidelines for the Remote DBA who is facing installation or upgrade of the Oracle products.

Generic Installation Issues

In any installation, whether it is on W2K, NT, UNIX, or Linux, there are certain items that must be addressed. These include:

* Disk space availability
* Remote DBA account setup
* Training
* File layout
* Tablespace layout
* Database-specific topics

We will cover these topics in turn and, hopefully, in doing so provide the Remote DBA with the information to arrive at logical answers to installation questions that may arise.
Disk Space Availability

More installations are probably messed up due to disk space availability than any other cause. Disk fragmentation doesn’t seem to be a problem under UNIX or NT, however I do suggest you defragment any NT system that has been in operation for extended periods of time prior to the Oracle installation unless you are installing to fresh disks. With most modern systems, disk space is allocated dynamically. This means that as a file needs space, it is granted space wherever it is available on a disk. On active systems, where files are created, updated, and deleted or moved to different disks, this results in fragmentation. This can result in problems for the Remote DBA on NT systems since most aren’t provided with a disk defragmentation tool.

This is an excerpt by Mike Ault’s book “Oracle9i Administration & Management”. If you want more current Oracle tips by Mike Ault, check out his new book “Mike Ault’s Oracle Internals Monitoring & Tuning Scripts” or Ault’s Oracle Scripts Download.