Changing ORACLE_HOME

        Recently, I had to change ORACLE_HOME for 2 databases. The first database only involved 3 disks (1.5G) worth of data, so Oracle's standard procedure of copying the files to the new location and then renaming them inside the database was not overly cumbersome, if also not very challenging. However, the second production database fills 26 disks (13G). The prospect of copying that many files, not even considering that we currently do not have 26 unused disks, led us to consider a more creative solution to the problem.

        I shut down the database and used symbolic links to "create" the files in their new location. Then, after starting up the database and mounting it exclusively, I renamed all the database files. I then shut down the database, removed the links, dismounted the disks, mounted the database in its new location, started it up, and was ready to rock-n-roll. This part of the procedure took surprisingly little time. Updating all the scripts, aliases, .profile and .login files, backup scripts, etc. took the rest of the weekend.

        Hope this helps someone. Of course, your mileage may vary. We are running Oracle Version 6.0.33. under Amdahl UTS Version 2.1.2.

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|                       Cindy Mumford                                 | 
|               UUCP: ...!uunet!dprmpt!cindy                          |