Re: Oracle installation problems

t_pascal_at_my-deja.com wrote:
> I think it is generally well known that Oracle has the shittiest
piece
> of installation software in this godforsaken industry full of really
> bad, really shitty products.
>
> Solaris installation: 3 weeks to operational database
> Linux installation: 3 days to get the installation program up and
> running! 2 weeks and counting for operational database
>

I'll assume since the vote was unanimous that it's just me. I will state, however, that I have not seen one single "pop the CD in and go" installation, ever. In fact, the best consultants I've seen have the binaries and base DB in some image format and cp or tar the damn thing.

The Solaris installation took 3 weeks and was Oracle 9i Portal. That could be the problem. We had a working database the first day, sorry for the miscommunication. It took three weeks of support, tars, metatars, patches, patches to patches, and other horrible ugliness of which I don't even know the details to get the Portal login screen.

To explain, I'm an OS/network/harware person. 15 years in my line of work and I've never seen an Oracle installation go smoothly, even in the hands of some people I can tell are clearly experienced and gifted with Oracle.

Someone mentioned the http://www.puschitz.com link (which is the most awesomely excellent Oracle site ever). The fact that the site exists, and you can read all the problems listed in it, goes contrary to the 100 "idiot" votes I got. It is precisely by following the instructions from puschitz that you can avoid 90% of the grief of an "official" install.

The Linux installation is just ridiculous. Yes, approved RedHat AS 3.0 installation. The setup required two OS patches and one runInstaller patch just to get the installer running (thanks puschitz). Even after installation, the dbca file wasn't installed. One of our better DBAs tracked the obscure problem down to a missing ORACLE_BASE environment variable. I've never seen that be a problem before, in fact, I'm looking at the Oracle install documentation, right in front of me right now, which clearly states that it is an OPTIONAL environment setting.

I guess having a working database is optional.

But what do I know? I'm clearly wrong. Received on Thu Mar 10 2005 - 10:39:03 CST