Re: AIX 4.3.3 , Oracle 7.3.4 coredumps at startup

On Thu, 6 Nov 2003, lost in dbspace wrote:

> I need to move an Oracle 7.3.4 database and application from an old
> AIX 4.2.1 J40 machine to a newer p660 box that is running 4.3.3 of
> AIX. I cannot port the database to Oracle 8 or later since the app
> progs are closed-source (was written in cobol), the vendor is not
> around anymore, and they used variable names imbedded in the sql of
> the apps that are now reserved words in Oracle 8 and later.

You might consider using a binary editor to modify the sql in the installed programs. Ugly, but it may let you upgrade if that's what you really want to do. Any use of ROWIDs will keep you from moving, however.

If (like me) you use vi, vim is binary-safe (find on freshmeat.net).

> I installed the Oracle 7.3.4 from cdrom onto the new machine, did a
> clone-style copy of the database filles over but the instant you run
> svrmgrl and try to do a "startup nomount" to get ready to create new
> controlfiles, Oracle 7.3.4 instantly coredumps.

Put away your installation media and forget a new install for the moment. Erase your new install. Transfer the entire contents of $ORACLE_HOME from the old box to the new (I would use tar piped to ssh as I once documented here: http://rhadmin.org/book/4/4.htm#ssh), set up your environment variables and oratab, and try to start svrmgrl nomount again.

If it won't start you either:
a) put on a patch that killed it
b) have a kernel parameter that is killing it

As far as I know, AIX doesn't have tunable kernel parameters, so b is unlikely.

Under HP-UX, I've seen patches that kill Oracle (10.20 support plus)- the answer was to relink. You can relink with:

cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib
make -f ins_rdbms.mk install

Hopefully you have enough of the compiler tools to do this. If you are missing something, you might try installing gcc (or xlc if you've bought it).

After relinking, try svrmgrl again.

> Will Oracle 7.3.4 compiled for AIX 4.1/4.2 just simply not run on this
> new machine? The old machine had 7.3.4 and 8.0.5 running concurrently
> with no problems for a long time, but it's out of disk space now and I
> really need to get the database and apps onto the newer box since it
> has boatloats of disk space, ram, and cpu horsepower to spare.

> Any ideas?

If you get this to work, be sure to keep the old box around in case you need to modify the installed software under $ORACLE_HOME.

If you can't get it to work, use "ALTER INDEX REBUILD" to collect indexes in tablespaces with like-sized extents (I've seen gigs of badly-allocated space reclaimed with this type of operation).

   / Charles J. Fisher                   |"The prettiest girls in the world  /
  /  cfisher_at_rhadmin.org                 | live in Des Moines, Iowa."       /
 /   http://rhadmin.org                  |   -Jack Kerouac                 /
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