Re: exadata role separation between gi and dbms

I have seen both configurations: grid/oracle or oracle/oracle for Grid and RDBMS homes. This is on RAC, Oracle Restart and Exadata. Larger organisations are more likely to require such a setup, as it keeps the system and storage administrators nominally in charge. It doesn't imply that storage admins know about ASM and even less about ASM mirroring (thanks to Joel Goodman for an enlightening conversation about the subject!)

But back to the point: since 11.2.0.2 it is rather painless to have grid and oracle accounts. The opatch auto option so far has reliably detected that they were owned by different accounts, and if you check the logs you see the su - <owner> -c foo commands quite nicely. The only exception to the rule is when there were no databases running out of the RDBMS home, in which case I had to manually patch it with opatch auto ... -oh /path/to/oracle/home.

Now there is another caveat: are you root on the machine or do you have to phone someone up?

I have once been caught out by having set ORA_CRS_HOME during a 10.2 to 11.2 migration where half the migration scripts called 10.2 instead of their 11.2 equivalents. Oracle development ought to unset environment variables in each of their shell scripts, but they don't. Not a problem as long as you remember or document the step.

My 0.02

Martin

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