New Install and oinstall Group

[Michael42]

Hello,

I am installing Oracle 10g on a Solaris 8 system in hopes of testing the upgrade process. This test system, as my production systems, already has Oracle 9i installed.

Concerning the Oracle directories, the Oracle docs state:

# chown -R oracleinstall /u01/app/oracle
# chown -R oracleinstall /u02/oradata

I am concerned that this will adversly effect the home and data directories owned as oracle:dba

Can anyone please offer any advice?

Thanks,

Michael42

 

[oradba101]

Hi, Michael42

Typically, during the installation of Oracle10g, the installer will recognize that there is already an Oracle home defined and will therefore offer the option of installing into a different home. Two items to note:

1. Oracle allows only one universal installer on the system at one time and will unistall the 9i version before installation of 10g.
2. If you use OLEDB and you have it installed for 9i the 10g version will not install because Oracle only allows one version of OLEDB at a time and will not overwrite the version that is currently on the system.

Regards,

William Chadbourne
Oracle DBA

 

[markrem]

Michael42,

If you already have oracle owned by oracle:dba, then I suggest you keep it that way. Oracle's documentation is trying to help you build a system that supports multiple Oracle DBA teams all sharing one installer program. That's not at all required, just a suggestion from Oracle. If you want, you can also make oinstall the secondary group, so you're in oinstall but dba is still your primary group. This also works very well for organizations with multiple DBA teams sharing servers.

As William correctly stated, each host can only have one OUI program by default, but on UNIX this is easily resolved and you really can have multiple inst_loc locations per box if you really needed to. Each time a different team wants to run the installer just switch to the inst_loc file of choice, and it points to the oraInventory location of choice. Again, this is atypical and most people don't even bother with the oinstall group.

Cheers,


MarkRem
Author, Oracle Database 10g: From Nuts to Soup

http://www.remidata.com/book_nuts2soup.htm