Since we started down this road last year launching Connect to go with the IdeaFactory, one common ask has been blogs.
Blogs are a cornerstone of Web 2.0, allowing anyone to publish content and anyone to participate. We discussed very early on whether we should provide a blogging platform, like multi-user WordPress or MoveableType, for internal [...]
A funny from a system test server today, which is being refreshed. The database is up and the oracle account can login through SQL*Plus without a hitch. However, when we attempt to connect through the OPS$ accounts, via sudo, we get the following error:
ERROR:ORA-01034: ORACLE not availableORA-27101: shared memory realm does not existSVR4 Error: 2: No such file or directory
The first thought which occurs is the ORACLE_SID is wrong but it is not. Although the answer does lie in the .profile as it is the ORACLE_HOME which is wrong. The oracle account has an ORACLE_HOME of /u01/app/oracle/products/9.2.0 and the other accounts have /u01/app/oracle/product/9.2.0. Subtle, eh?
I think the difference occurred because Oracle was originally installed on this server at an earlier version and then subsequently upgraded, whereas the .profile files were copied from a server which had had a greenfield installation of Oracle 9iR2. The default path suggested by DBCA is definitely app/oracle/product/n.n.n and has been for quite a while. I don’t know where the /products/ variant originated; judging by the relative number of Google hits, /product/ is the industry standard. Perhaps it didn’t always used to be.
LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology
Yesterday, I wrote Recruiters: How to work with techies. A few hours later, I got laid off. Irony? You betcha!
Yep, fired. Given the old heave ho. Downsized. Placed into a career transition. Restructured. Pinched while dangling. My services are no
I’m now working in a client site. One of the differences is that each development desktop bears a smug “Ubuntu - Linux for human beings” sticker. This is the first time I have really tangled with Linux. I’m not going to risk the wrath of Verity Stob by detailing my journey into the heart of the penguin. But I thought it would be worthwhile documenting my experiences with installing Oracle 10gR2 on Ubuntu 8.04 (AKA Hardy Heron).
Ubuntu is touted as a user-friendly flavour of Linux, and certainly the graphical desktop is welcoming to people used to Windows. However things get pretty gnarly pretty quickly as soon as you want to do anything off piste. And Oracle is not supported on Ubuntu ( the supported distros are Suse, RHEL, Asialux and Oracle’s own Unbreakable Linux) things go very off piste indeed. In the absence of official documentation we’re thrown on the resources of the internet. There is lots of information out there - the sort of people who love Linux are the sort of people who love the web - but it is often written with a presumption of familiarity in Linux. In amongst the shedloads of helpful advice there are opaque sentences such as this): “to install lesstif2 you will need to use ‘Adept’ to enable the universe repository or edit /etc/apt/source.list” (unfairly quoting Todd Trichler out of context). I know I should have devoted myself to studying the Linux architecture before I started but I really needed to install Oracle now.
The first guide Google turned up was Luca Mearelli’s Installazione di Oracle 10g su Ubuntu Linux which as you might have guessed is written in Italian. I found this quite distracting as anything in that language sounds like opera.
Madame Butterfly. Act 2. Scene 1.Whilst she awaits the return of Lt Pinkerton Koko-chan amuses herself by installing Oracle on different Linux distros. She sings the aria Impostazione dei parametri del kernel.
It was the setting of kernel parameters which drew me up short. There was no explanation (and even if there had been, my Italian would not have been up to translating it). Should I be changing kernel values on the say-so of a random Google hit?
So I surfed a bit more and found Installing 11g on Ubuntu Hardy Heron by Pythian’s Augusto Bott. This article is so good that it has been ripped off by plagiarising sites. Augusto’s guide included the same changes to the same kernel parameters as Luca’s guide but it included explanations (through a link to his earlier article about installing Oracle 11g on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn). Although he wrote his guide for 11g it works just as well for 10g. There were still a few things which caused me some puzzlement and I will discuss those below.
I wasted a lot of time trying to install 64-bit Oracle (because we have 64-bit desktops). I could download it and run the Installer but I couldn’t get OUI to link the database packages. The problem is:
INFO: /usr/bin/ld: skipping incompatible /u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_2/lib/libsql10.a when searching for -lsql10
After a couple of hours fruitlessly downloading further packages I gave up and tried 32-bit, which worked first time without a hitch.
Step 3 applied because I was installing on the Ubuntu desktop. The gotcha is in the innocuous statement “You will have to restart your Xserver for this change to take effect.” The Ubuntu desktop environment is X so the simplest way of doing this is to logout and login again. However I only discovered this fact after I issued the following command in a terminal window:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
Theoretically this should have just dumped me out to a text-mode command prompt. It didn’t quite work that way so I had to resort to a hard reboot. Incidentally, another way to get out of the graphical environment is ALT+CTRL+F1 while ALT+CTRL+F7 gets you back again.
In Step 8 the wise man will take a backup of these files just in case. The suggested values seem to be common across all the install guides I read, so I trusted them 
Given that I was only installing locally I didn’t bother setting the network parameters.
Step 9 is the actual install of the software. Oracle’s Universal Installer is a Java applet, which is why we need to change the X Windows settings. If you have trouble with this step first make sure you have done Step 3 properly. However I still got the OUI-10025 message. More Googling threw up this piece of voodoo, which solved the problem:
clarkea@clarkea-desktop:~$ export DISPLAY=:0.0clarkea@clarkea-desktop:~$ sudo su - oracleYour account has expired; please contact your system administratorsu: User account has expired(Ignored)oracle@clarkea-desktop:~$ export DISPLAY=:0.0oracle@clarkea-desktop:~$ xhost +access control disabled, clients can connect from any hostoracle@clarkea-desktop:~$
If xhost or xclock works then you can run OUI.
The OUI wizard is slightly different in 10g. In particular it doesn’t prompt for ORACLE_BASE and it defaults the paths to hang off your $HOME directory. You may want to change the location to /u01/app.
For me the actual install and linking process did not take nearly as long as Augusto suggests it will. Obviously our machines are a lot more powerful than his
Finally, if you apply the scripts Augusto suggests you will need to change the paths to point to 10.2.0 instead of 11.1.0.
To apply the 10.2.0.4 patch you just need to repeat the process.
Augusto’s earlier article on installing on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (which has some additional explanation of the parameter tweaking)
Wordpress 2.6 is out, so get upgrading…
Cheers
Tim…
Here comes another installment in my FAQ series. This one isn’t a question I get asked, but rather one I ask.
Inevitably, when you start a community or release an application to customers, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got the blessing of three groups within your company.
Human Resources
Legal
Security
In any size company, you’ll need to do [...]
I’m running a (currently) one-off Oracle 11g data warehousing seminar for Oracle University on the 17th and 18th September in Copenhagen, in a similar format to the Oracle BI seminars I ran over the last couple of years. It’s aimed at DBAs and data warehouse developers who want a better understanding of the core database [...]
Edward Roske over at the Look Smarter blog recently picked up on the release of the new Oracle EPM System 11.1 over at edelivery.oracle.com. Edward notes that this release is initially Windows only and includes improvements to Essbase an a new integrated Essbase development IDE called Essbase Studio.
For me this is potentially a very interesting [...]