Oracle10g: ASM instance spfile overwritten?

Good day, everyone.

I installed Oracle 10g on Linux for POWER (IBM pSeries 570 machine LPAR) for testing purposes few days ago (planning to migrate from 9.2 this year). Since database storage resides on the SAN RAID10 LUNs, I have decided to try ASM, as there was so much written about its ease of use and management.

So, I installed 10.2.0.1, applied 10.2.0.2 on top of it immediately, then run DBCA, configured ASM (just specified one disk group and one raw partition) and created test database. Everything worked fine, so I loaded some of our production data in order to test applications. Next day I have decided to change certain parameters (maximum SGA size), and, since I am not really familiar with 10g, I bounced the database, as I normally do with 9i to apply new startup parameters. ASM instance failed not start, so did database instance. Looking at ASM instance alert log I found that it is complaining about inability to find control files residing on '+SDC2/lnx10g.....' - clearly an ASM file spec. Investigating further, I found out, that ?/dbs/spfile+ASM.ora file contained parameters for database instance, rather then for ASM instance! I re-created spfile manually, added disk group again and now everything seem to work fine. Now, the question is - how it may happen that spfile for ASM has been overwritten by database instance parameters? These files even reside in completely different places - ASM spfile is in ?/dbs and database spfile is on ASM storage!

Could it be caused by the fact, that (in my infinite wisdom) I have put 'export ORACLE_SID=lnx10g' in 'oracle' account startup file (?/.bash_login) from the very beginning (before installing Oracle software) and this somehow led dbca or other utility/script to overwrite spfile? Is there anything wrong with having ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_BASE in the same directory (in my case /app/oracle)?

Does anyone know about similar issues with 10g? I would like to know before we migrate our production AIX/Oracle9i systems to 10g...

Alex Received on Fri Feb 09 2007 - 02:17:10 CST