Oracle10g

Continuing from my previous Oracle posts.

Week 3 of Oracle and this week I have had a lot of breakthroughs. Most important discoveries were emconsole and dbca.

There are so many weird things going on in Oracle. I could rant all month, but I’ll try make this short. All I can say is that Oracle are on a sweet ride. They get great money from their corporate customers, though their product is so infuriating to use!

For example, release 2 of 10g is 100 upon 100 of megs of odd packages that you sometimes feel like asking your boss to buy the damn CD.

The Oracle bug database, metalink. What a joke. I still have not figured out how to report bugs. I don’t think I’ll bother.

Oracle Documentation on the “oracle database documentation library” SUCKS. It’s so boring to read. The Windows centric 2 day DBA might point you in the right direction.

Make sure ORACLE_SID points to your DB name!

emctl start dbconsole

Probably want to setup the listener by hand:

lsnrctl status
lsnrctl start

About the Enterprise Manager for Oracle 10g console. It’s actually a “self hosted” J2EE (urgh) Web application. It’s a beast and it’s buggy. Though it seems better than the other tools in the 10 million CD suite. My friend’s “Oracle DBA Guy” says it is the bomb. What the hell did Oracle DBAs work with before? ;)

Yes, I have seen that SQL SCRIPTS used to maintain Oracle in an OLD SKOOL way. Christ, what crap.

Tour my screenshots of Oracle 10g.:
* Stupid SYSDBA login
* The console
* Bottom of the console
* Performance graphing with SVG!
* Admin tab
* Maintain tab
* Patching feature. COOL. Pity it doesn’t work very well.

For administrators or “deployment managers” (someone corporates hire when their project is running late to help actually deliver and take the blame) like me, you can do everything there except setup a database. That’s where dbca comes in.

Creating a database in Oracle is tricky. I was presented with a whole bunch of scripts to setup a client’s database. Unfortunately those scripts were dependent on version 9 of Oracle and they were not porting well over to 10g.

In frustration I did create a user and a tablespace in the default orcl database. That’s the wrong way. Use dbca, ok?
Dbca is a Java GUI app that sets up a default database which is amazingly close to my client’s own DB creation scripts. Yay. It does create an HTML file of the specs when you’re done. I don’t see how one can use that as a template for future databases. It’s unparsable FFS.

Hmm, what other tips can I share. Starting it up is hell. If your database is called “rinco” make sure then environment variable ORACLE_SID is equal to that.

Something else mildly interesting. The way you log in. You need to use the /nolog feature and the connect as a sys DBA. Argh:

[oracle@server ~]$ export ORACLE_SID=orcl
[oracle@server ~]$ sqlplus /nolog

SQL*Plus: Release 10.1.0.3.0 – Production on Tue Jul 5 16:37:31 2005

Copyright© 1982, 2004, Oracle. All rights reserved.

SQL> connect / as sysdba
Connected.
SQL> startup

Lastly: Oracle Blogs

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