Re: Help: - dbstart on Oracle9i/redhat8

Rent Houses wrote:

> Hi there,
> My installation is done but dbstart gives the following
> <<<
> Can't find init file for Database "sid".
> Database "sid" NOT started.
> >>>
> BTW, lsnrctl start listener is OK and I saw ora processes running good
> when the installation was finished but not now after rebooting.
> Thanks in advance.

Welcome to the world of Oracle (in)consistency.

In 9i, Oracle introduced the concept of the spfile. It's a binary file that does the job of the old init.ora. DBCA with which you probably created your new database uses the spfile by default. Oracle is, indeed, strongly pushing everybody to use the spfile.

Unfortunately, dbstart still expects to find an init.ora!!

The fix is easy, luckily enough. All you need do is create an init.ora that points to where the spfile can actually be found.

So first find your spfile (it should be in ORACLE_HOME/dbs and called spfileSID.ora -and I hope it's obvious that 'SID' in the name there should be replaced with whatever your ORACLE_SID is actually set to). In ORACLE_HOME/dbs then create a new text file called initSID.ora. In that new text file, enter just one line of information:

SPFILE=/xxxx/aaaaaa/yyyyy/spfileSID.ora

Replace the path there with the fully-qualified path to the ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory... ORACLE_HOME is itself just an environment variable, and they can change meaning, so it is generally bad form to include it in these sorts of things directly. Enter what ORACLE_HOME actually means.

After that, it should all just work.

Since you are on Linux, the other way of achieving the same thing is to create a symbolic link to the spfile, and rename it so that it has the name initSID.ora.

Regards
HJR Received on Wed Aug 25 2004 - 14:39:00 CDT