Re: Upgrading/Patching Oracle on a laptop

On 11 Jan 2006 10:42:54 -0800, "Gerald" <dbyte32_at_gmail.com> wrote:

> I have Windows XP Service Pack 2 with oracle server 9.2.0.1.0
>installed on my laptop for local development. I want to bring my local
>database server up to version 9.2.0.6.0 or 9.2.0.7.0. to match what my
>clients have installed on the server.
>
> Under XP the installer asks that over 2 dozens services be shutdown
>and some of these windows will not allow to be stopped.
>
>Has any one succesfully upgraded an Oracle 9.2.0.1.0 database on
>under WIndows XP? Any ideas on how to get around having to disable over
>2 dozens services.

 Which services is it listing?  

 This can happen if you have a non-Oracle service that itself loads Oracle libraries; for example, if you're running IIS with PHP or ASP, and it connects to an Oracle database.

 The Oracle DLLs get loaded into the context of one of the shared svchost.exe processes - these are shared between multiple services. This causes _all_ of those services to show up as needing to be shut down, from the point of view of the Oracle installer, since they all have this common .exe with the Oracle DLLs loaded.

 You either need to make sure that the actual service or services that load Oracle DLLs don't start up after a reboot, by putting them on Manual or Disabled - this would be the preferred method - or you need to find out exactly what has the Oracle DLLs loaded with a tool like "Process Explorer" (Google it, it's free and the same site has numerous useful tools) - and exit the processes if possible, or terminate the processes if not.

 If it's an svchost.exe process that has the DLLs loaded, you _can_ use Process Explorer to terminate that process, and then patch Oracle. You would then likely want to reboot afterwards to restore any other affected services to working order. This is a practical but not very "correct" approach - but since you're working on Windows XP then it doesn't matter much if you have to reboot or mess around with processes a bit. Just don't try this approach on an actual server operating system (i.e. Windows 2003, which is the closest Windows gets to a server OS).

-- 
Andy Hassall :: andy@andyh.co.uk :: http://www.andyh.co.uk
http://www.andyhsoftware.co.uk/space :: disk and FTP usage analysis tool