Posts Tagged ‘11g Release 2’

I’m extremely happy to report that 11g Release 2 installs onto 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 without fuss or bother (or error!) if you simply follow the instructions I’ve posted previously:

Inevitably, the installer will freak out with (it thinks) barely any of the necessary prerequisite packages installed! But a quick ‘Ignore All’ will sort that out (always assuming you’ve actually followed those earlier instructions!), after which it’s completely plain sailing (not even one linking error, either).

Just note that in those previous instructions, I’d hard-coded a path to /u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1. That will work well enough, but you will probably want to change that to be the all-new, all-shiny /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/db_1!

Update: GOAL now handles all Oracle installations onto 64-bit Ubuntu

Thanks to a nasty bout of ‘flu-like symptoms, I have been able to experiment with Goal (my graphical oracle all-in-one loader script) and the new 11g Release 2 rather sooner than I was expecting to be able to. I am running a temperature and feeling pretty bloody awful, so apologies if this is not quite as polished and coherent as it should be!

Now, you will remember to start with that Goal seeks to do just one thing: install 64-bit Oracle onto 64-bit Red Hat 5 (or Centos 5 or Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 or any exactly-equivalent recompilation of Red Hat source code). Just so we set expectations suitably low!

The good news is that a new version of Goal is now available which allows for 10g Release 2, 11g Release 1 and 11g Release 2 installations and which works almost perfectly (I’ll come to explain that “almost” in just a moment!) The kernel parameters required for an 11g Release 2 installation have changed significantly since 11g Release 1 days (so when other sites simply re-badge their 11gR1 articles without changing the actual content, be warned!), so that’s why Goal has to allow for two different types of 11g installation: the settings for 11gR1 would be inadequate for 11gR2 and cause the installer to stall you on a page warning of this fact. Anyway, I’ve gone through the official documentation and made sure that Goal sets the recommended values for all the assorted kernel parameters, old and new.

I have, however, encountered what is perhaps 11gR2’s first bug! The documentation (at Section 4.3) clearly says that for Red Hat 5 (and hence Centos 5, which is what I was using), one of the required prerequisite packages is ksh-20060214. I don’t have a problem with that: Goal does actually download and install the package ksh, which is close enough. The bug, however, is that the installer will insist that you don’t have the package pdksh installed. Which is true enough: it isn’t installed because the package doesn’t actually exist in the RH5 repositories! Pdksh is a published requirement for Red Hat 4, however, not Red Hat 5… so it would seem that the installer has been written to deal with both RH4 and RH5 installations with the unfortunate consequence that it demands the installation on RH5 of a package which actually should be demanded of an installation on RH4.

The long and the short of this is that it seems impossible to go through Oracle’s 11gR2 installer wizard without being told at one point that you have failed to install a required package… even though it doesn’t exist for RH5 and even though the documentation itself makes it clear it is not a required package on RH5 at all! It would be nice to have a 100% flawless installation wizard, but this “issue” prevents that from happening -and there’s nothing Goal can do about it. I believe that if you are using “proper” distros (such a true Red Hat Enterprise Server 5 or Oracle Enterprise Linux 5), rather than cheap clones such as Centos, this problem goes away. I have to do some more testing to determine that, though.

Anyway, in the meantime, it’s possible to simply click the ‘Ignore All’ checkbox at this point, and the installation will proceed despite the “missing” package.

And it will proceed smoothly, without errors or alerts about ‘error in invoking target install of makefile such-and-such’. The whole thing succeeds completely, in other words, and without fuss or bother.

Hooray. At last, 11g Release 2 is available for download (and, interestingly enough, for Linux first… and currently only!). Go here if you want it.

It’s been a long time between releases. Much longer than, for example, between 9iR1 and 9iR2 or between 10gR1 and 10gR2. Or maybe it just feels that way! Anyway, 11gR1 was a bit of a dog in my not-so-humble opinion: polished, certainly, but with a curious lot of bugs, too. I’ve certainly kept work at 10.2.0.4 for quite a while, simply because I wouldn’t touch 11g with a long bargepole. But now that release 2 is out, it may be worth re-checking the state of play. Experiments begin at once, of course!!

The first thing that will trip up the unwary is that 11gR2 comes in two parts. That is, there are two zip files to download, each about 1GB big. You need both. What’s more, you need to unzip both into the one database directory before you can use the resulting uncompressed file structure as an installation medium. If you’re using my instructions on how to create ISO images from OTN downloads, for example, you’ll need to do the following:

• Download both zip files to your desktop
• Open a command prompt and unzip the linux_11gR2_database_1of2.zip file. That will create a database directory.
• Now unzip the linux_11gR2_database_2of2.zip file. The contents of this file will be extracted into the already-existing database directory.
• Now you can create your ISO image from the Desktop/database directory, using the command I documented before:

genisoimage -o Desktop/ora11gx64.iso -R -J -hfs Desktop/database

After that’s all done, you’ll be able to burn the ISO to disk as per normal… and then you’ll want to install it onto something!

As far as that goes, I am happy to report that Doris works fine with the new release, provided you’re running on Centos/Redhat/OEL (that is, I haven’t tested anything else). She gets invoked as per normal (i.e., as root from a login shell (so su – root to start with) and then something like ./home/hjr/Desktop/doris1.1g.sh redhat5 11g). The installer sports a radically new look:

…and she’ll complain that various parameters aren’t set correctly and that assorted packages aren’t installed. But if you select the ‘Ignore All’ check box at that point, the installation will nevertheless complete successfully. The path created for the installation by Doris is wrong, of course (11.1.0, rather than -say- 11.2.0), but don’t let that little detail stop you either. Additionally, you’ll get an ‘error in invoking target install of  makefile … ins_ctx.mk’. You can ignore that, too (and I’ll work out what’s causing it and write a proper fix before too long). The point is, you end up with a fully-functional system-plus-database in less time than it takes to make a wallaby drink a cup of coffee.

I haven’t tested Goal yet, because I can’t currently access a 64-bit Centos/Red Hat machine… but I’ll obviously be checking ASAP (and posting back as required!)

Note that there will be an extremely long pause, with nothing very obviously happening, at the point where the installer hits the ‘Oracle Database configuration’ installation item. Just be very, very patient and you’ll eventually be rewarded with the usual sort of ‘create database’ progress bar. But it does take an awfully long time to appear!