Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
Installing the Oracle Database
The previous chapter dealt with the installation of Oracle Linux, and its configuration in preparation of the installation
of the Oracle binaries. As you have seen there are a number of prerequisites that needed to be met. In this chapter
the focus shifts to the Oracle binary installation. In this respect the chapter is divided into two parts. The first one will
explain the installation of Oracle Restart or—as it is also known—Grid Infrastructure for a standalone server. You will
require such a setup if you would like to make use of ASM, which I recommend as an alternative to older file systems
not able to perform concurrent and direct I/O. If you decide to use a file system and don't want to make use of the
features offered by Oracle Restart besides ASM, feel free to skip directly to the RDBMS installation in part two.
I recommend you read on for arguments in favor of Oracle Restart because there are significant benefits to using it, as
described in the section “Installing Oracle Restart”.
The second part of the chapter explains the installation of the Oracle RDBMS binaries. Following the overall
scheme of the topic-automation and consolidation-silent installations of the software will be introduced, as well as
an option to install Oracle using the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM). Throughout the chapter, it is assumed that you
followed Oracle's advice and use separate accounts for the Grid Infrastructure and RDBMS binaries.
Preparing for the installation
There are a few things that you need to consider before you can start the installation of any Oracle product. First,
you obviously need the software, which you can download from OTN or Oracle's edelivery site. Then you need to
either configure your graphical user environment to perform an interactive installation, or alternatively prepare for
a silent installation.
Beginning with Oracle 11g Release 2 patchset 1 Oracle did a great thing and introduced patch sets as full releases.
In other words, instead of having to apply the base release plus all the patches to get to the desired patch level, all
you need to do is to download and install the patchset plus any Patch Set Updates. Just as before patches have to be
downloaded from My Oracle Support. Using full releases is a great time saver, and especially from an automation
point of view this makes life a lot easier by reducing the number of moving parts in your configuration.
The chapter assumes that Grid Infrastructure for a standalone server is owned by the grid account, whereas the
Oracle database binaries are owned by Oracle.
Staging the software
When planning for the next-generation Oracle environment, it is the right time to think about the deployment
structure. Instead of downloading and staging software and patches for every Oracle installation, you might consider
a central location to stage patches, scripts, and other Oracle related data. Consider a global environment with three
different locations for the staging servers: the Americas, Europe, and Asia. The locations have been chosen to be
equidistant and minimize network-latency between the sites when operating on a global scale. Standard utilities such
as
rsync
can be used to replicate information to each site overnight, keeping the systems in sync with one another.
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