Wheres the best plave to start?

[elziko]

I'm more involved with the data access side of things normally but the guy who originally installed and setup our Oracle 8i database has left. We now want to install the whole thing on a new machine and pull the entire database off the old machine and put it on the new one.

Wheres the best place to start and what's the best book to help me with this?

Thanks

elziko

 

[jee]

Believe it or not, I usually find the Oracle-supplied documentation to be the most helpful. For help with the installation, check the "Installation Guide" for your operating system.

For moving the database tables, etc. (probably best done with EXPORT/IMPORT), see the "Administrator's Guide" and the "Utilities Manual".

If you don't have these manuals, they are available online on the Oracle Technology Network site. You can sign up for OTN for free at the main Oracle site (I seem to be giving this advice frequently today).

 

[raygg]

These are some of the trial and error lessons I learned in moving a database from one server to another. First take a FULL=y backup of everything on the old database, and copy the init.ora, control files, and password files. Check the alert and trace logs for any recent problems that should be fixed before moving the database. On the new database you have to manually set up the tablespaces and users before importing the exported file from the old database. Set the INITIAL extent on tablespaces and datafiles to a value equal to the current size of the respective tablespace and datafile on the old databaseWhen using export, I find it is best to use a parfile (that's a configuration text file that you can put all the export line commands into) and create a log file both for the export and the import. Make sure that all the user privileges and roles that exist on the old database are set up on the new database before doing the import or a lot of objects will not get imported. Find out which tables have foreign keys in the schemas, if any. If any do, import the table definitions but not the data on the first import, and set ignore =y. Then import the data with ignore=y. If you choose compress=y this may cause problems soetimes with BLOB files in Oracle 8. Review your table INITIAL sizes using a tool like TOAD to make sure your INITIAL allocations for the tablespaces will handle the table sizes and allocations. If you have tables with default 50 percent increases defined, change the percent increases to zero or a smaller amount. When tables like this add a lot of extents, the INITIAL extent size on the table imported can sometimes exceed the size of the tablespace you are importing into. If you change any of the tablespace names, then you have to change all the table scripts on the import that use the tables with the changed tablespace names. Instead of doing a FULL=Y export I now only export the owner ID's of the schemas I need to move to avoid including all the system schemas on the export. I agree the Oracle docs are very good. Bookmark

http://tahiti.oracle.com/pls/tahiti/tahiti.homepage

for a good quick access to the docs you need. I found the Oracle Press Backup and recovery Handbook very valuable too.

Hope this helps.