Installing Oracle 10g on Debian

This guide is to help with installing Oracle 10g on Debian "stable" (currently Sarge) on the x86 architecture. If you are new to Debian and came to this page from OTN, then you may prefer to have a read through my Debian guide first.

Create the Database Administrator group

The first step in installing oracle is to create a dba group. Members of this group will have full administrative access to the oracle environment and to the database:

  /usr/sbin/groupadd -g 55 dba

Add your login username to this group:

  /usr/sbin/usermod -G dba username

Environment

Set your environment for the oracle install, for example by adding a small function to your $ORACLE_HOME/.bashrc file to set the required variables:

  go_10g()
  {
    export ORACLE_BASE=/u01/app/oracle
    export ORACLE_HOME=$ORACLE_BASE/product/10.1.0/db_1
    export ORACLE_SID=orcl
    export TNS_ADMIN=$ORACLE_HOME/network/admin
    export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib
  }

Be sure you don't include a trailing slash on your ORACLE_HOME environment variable, as the client oracle process needs to find the shared memory segment by using the very same ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID settings as are used when starting up the database instance. Any mismatch will result in the client connecting to what's known as an "idle instance".

If you see the following message when you type sqlplus / as sysdba then be sure to double-check your ORACLE_HOME and ORACLE_SID settings as well as using the commands ipcs and ps -ef|grep ora_ to check if the oracle "instance" is actually running.

  Connected to an idle instance.

Consult the Oracle Guide

A very detailed guide to installing oracle is maintained by Werner Puschitz. Even though his focus is on Red Hat, his oracle installation guide is mostly relevant to Debian. Jeffrey Hunter maintains guides to setting up inexpensive cluster configurations. Here, I'll only mention some additional details needed for Debian. Please also study the guide written by Graham Williams, it is specific to Debian and contains many things I missed including here. Another guide excellent Debian guide maintained by Zlatko Calusic is here. For Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn this forum post is useful.

The build of the Oracle software can be found by starting here, and clicking on the link called

  Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (10.1.0.3) for Linux x86

which brings up a license page, beyond which lies the download link for the file ship.db.lnx32.cpio.gz as well as a link to the installation guide.

Creating a Convenient Install CD-ROM

It's indeed puzzling that the files are provided as a gzipped cpio archive, but at least it is quite straightforward to create an ISO image, as all the filenames and directory names used fall within the Joliet specifications. To extract the downloaded archive, use:

 mkdir ora_10.1.0.3.0_x86 && cd $HOME/ora_10.1.0.3.0_x86
 zcat $HOME/ship.db.lnx32.cpio.gz|cpio -idmv

If you have sufficient disk space, you can of course launch the installation using the files extracted to $HOME/ora_10.1.0.3.0_x86 in this way from the archive. To instead create an ISO CD-ROM image suitable for burning to a CD-R, use the following:

mkisofs  -r -J  -o $HOME/cdimages/ora_10.1.0.3.0_x86.iso $HOME/ora_10.1.0.3.0_x86/Disk1

Preparing to Launch the Installer

As root, increase the maximum size of a contiguous shared memory segment to 170MB. Around 512MB of physical memory is needed to get an oracle install of 10g done in a timely fashion, although it will work with as little as 256MB as long as sufficient swap space is available.

Also, create a symbolic link so that basename can be invoked with the command /bin/basename, since the oracle installer script $ORACLE_HOME/bin/genagtsh uses this, which doesn't exist on Debian, which causes some linking problems during the install.

(cd /proc/sys/kernel; echo "178257920" > shmmax)
ln -s /usr/bin/basename /bin/basename

Launch the Installer

Here, I am assuming the CD has been written, and has been mounted on /media/cdrom. To launch the installer, the workaround flag -ignoreSysPrereqs is needed, as follows:

  mount /media/cdrom
  (cd $HOME && /media/cdrom/runInstaller -ignoreSysPrereqs)

Wait for the Oracle Universal Installer graphical screen to appear, and follow the usual steps in the installation guide. If you are logged into the graphical desktop as a different user to the one you are using for the oracle installation, the command sux - username is useful to preserve the DISPLAY settings (which are needed for the oracle installer). Another approach (convenient for remote installation) is to use ssh -X username@hostname to forward the X11 connections back to your graphical desktop (security is a concern, though, when using X11 forwarding, and many distributions disable it by default).

Handling the Expected Problems

When installing 10gR1 patchset 1 (10.1.0.3.0) on Debian, there may be a problem relinking both hsodbc and extproc agents. During the install, click "Continue" to get past these problems. Later, you may need to go back and relink the executables hsodbc and extproc manually. Normally, this is done by the following steps:

cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib
make -f ins_rdbms.mk client_sharedlib
make -f ins_rdbms.mk ihsodbc
make -f ins_rdbms.mk iextproc

Before running the above steps, make sure that the script $ORACLE_HOME/bin/genagtsh will be able to find basename. On Debian, basename is found in /usr/bin/basename, but the oracle script $ORACLE_HOME/bin/genagtsh has been hardcoded to use /bin/basename. Either change the script, or create a symbolic link as follows:

  ln -s /usr/bin/basename /bin/basename

Unlock Accounts

Once the installation is complete, the installer should have created a sample database, and started up some services. Towards the end of the database installation, you will be given the opportunity to take advantage of the GUI interface to unlock a few demo accounts (scott, hr, sh, oe).

Life as a GUI-dba

After a successful installation, the database should be up and running, and the Enterprise Manager dbconsole should also be running. If dbconsole isn't running, start it up using:

  emctl start dbconsole

If the Enterprise Manager dbconsole doesn't start, please inspect the EMD_URL entry in the following file, to check it is valid:

  $ORACLE_HOME/`hostname -f`_$ORACLE_SID/sysman/config/emd.properties

It should look something like this:

  EMD_URL=http://localhost.localdomain:1830/emd/main

Once dbconsole has started, connect to it using the Mozilla browser at the following URL:

  http://localhost:5500/em

Pretty much all the routine database administration tasks, and many performance tuning tasks can be done via this dbconsole browser interface, without ever going back to the command line. Enjoy life as a GUI-DBA

Database bindings for Python

Feeling a little queasy about using sqlplus to develop your SQL statements? Why not use a real programming language like Python to access your newly-installed database in a more object-oriented way? Matthew T. Kromer at Zope Corporation built what is known as a database binding for Python, and gave it the name DCOracle2. It can be found on the Python Database Modules page, and the source code can be checked out from CVS using:

cvs -z7 -d ':pserver:anonymous@cvs.zope.org:/cvs-repository' checkout Products/DCOracle2

or if you are behind a http proxy, as follows:

cvs -z7 -d ':pserver;proxy=your-proxy.your-domain;proxyport=80:anonymous@cvs.zope.org:/cvs-repository' checkout Products/DCOracle2

After making sure the environment variable ORACLE_HOME is set, and that you have the python-dev package installed, build DCoracle2 as follows:

cd Products/DCOracle2
python setup.py install

This will give a compile error (shown below). All this is saying is that (dword *) is undeclared in the source file src/dco2.c. It's easy to fix by just editing src/dco2.c and changing the three occurrences of (dword *) into (dvoid *), and then re-issuing the build command.

src/dco2.c:3393: error: `dword' undeclared (first use in this function)
src/dco2.c:3393: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
src/dco2.c:3393: error: for each function it appears in.)
src/dco2.c:3393: error: parse error before ')' token
src/dco2.c:3395: error: parse error before ')' token
src/dco2.c:3412: error: parse error before ')' token

Note: you need to be root for python to be able to install the database binding lubrary dco2.so into /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages, so re-issuing the build command as root may be the most convenient way to get things set up.

To test if your newly built DCOracle2 database binding works with your Oracle 10gR1 installation, start up the database and create the scott user with the password tiger, e.g. as follows:

grant connect, resource to scott identified by tiger;
alter user scott account unlock;

Then load the example files scott.sql and procdef.sql from the DCOracle2 download "test" directory as follows:

 @Products/DCOracle2/test/scott.sql
 @Products/DCOracle2/test/procdef.sql

Now try things out in python:

python

>>> import DCOracle2
>>> db = DCOracle2.connect('scott/tiger')
>>> c = db.cursor()
>>> c.execute('select * from emp where empno=7902')
1
>>> print c.fetchall()
[[7902, 'FORD', 'ANALYST', 7566, OracleDate("1981-12-03 00:00:00"), 3000.0, None, 20]]
>>> find = c.procedure.scott.emp_actions.find
>>> print find.__doc__
function SCOTT.EMP_ACTIONS.FIND returns OUT VARCHAR2, has arguments:
        EMPID IN NUMBER
>>> print find(7902)
FORD

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-- PeterKnaggs - 27 Sep 2005
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