Re: Oracle10g: ASM instance spfile overwritten?

On 9 Feb 2007 01:18:36 -0800, "sybrandb" <sybrandb_at_gmail.com> wrote:

>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.

Thanks a lot, Sybrand. Seems you are right, indeed I had just a quick look over the 10gR2 release notes for Linux on POWER (I know, I know, bad practice!). I'd give it another try after reading installation manual to see if the issue will happen again. As for exact commands performed during install - I did not do anything from the command line, just followed runInstaller and dbca blindly, selecting default options, apart from ORACLE_BASE and ORACLE_HOME being same. Changing maximum SGA size has been pretty straightforward - alter system set sga_max_size=1536M scope=pfile at the SQL> prompt then dbshut/dbstart.

Alex Received on Fri Feb 09 2007 - 03:47:07 CST