Re: Oracle10g: ASM instance spfile overwritten?

On Feb 9, 9:17 am, AlexB <b..._at_pisem.net> wrote:
> 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

Likely these are not issues with 10g. One would have known after several years of 10g. So likely this is an issue with - not reading installation documentation - not following procedures to the letter Undoubtedly dbca will 'pick up' ORACLE_SID, dbca at least does SET ORACLE_SID.
The default name for the spfile is
?/dbs/spfile@.ora
where ? is ORACLE_HOME and @ is ORACLE_SID. Personally I would make sure ORACLE_BASE never ever equals ORACLE_HOME, for the simple reason this doesn't conform to OFA. As you don't explain what you did *exactly* (ie exact commands) and my crystal ball has worn out by similar queries, you probably won't get a more accurate answer.

--
Sybrand Bakker
Senior Oracle DBA