Looking for the location of oraInventory on a server? Want to know where it is? Read on. There is a file, known to Oracle, which holds the location of the inventory. Of course, it isn’t in the same place on every server, but the ones I know of have it as follows: Linux: /etc/oraInst.loc HP-UX: /var/opt/oracle/oraInst.loc Windows: Registry at HKLM/software/oracle/inst_loc For any other Unix, you can find it (as the oracle or root user) with:

As you may know, Oracle databases come with a number of options. Some of these cost extra and if inadvertantly installed, Oracle must be paid money - note, you don’t have to be using them, only have them installed, to require payment. So what do you do if you need to remove an option? In the old days, you used to have to rebuild the oracle binaries to add or remove options.

In order to downgrade an 11.2.0.3 Enterprise Edition database to Standard Edition, I had to use a Transportable Tablespace export/import. Because the default setting for DEFERRED_SEGMENT_CREATION is TRUE, the tablespace import barfed with numerous “IMP-00017: following statements failed with ORACLE error 1647:” errors. Want to know why? The ORA-01649 error is “Tablespace is read only, cannnot allocate space in it” which is interesting as I’m importing a Transportable Tablespace dump file and all the tablespaces are read only after being created, until I manually make then read write.

Update: 23/02/2023: The following link no longer exists. Some people are confused by the clustering factor of an index in an Oracle database. Be confused no more, just read this article by Tom Kyte on the subject.

Adrci is a new tool in Oracle 11g which makes life a little easier when gathering evidence to send off to Oracle Support, but it can make life easier when you simply wish to view the alert log, for example. As ever, you need to be logged in to the database server and have the environment set in the normal oraenv manner. This is how we used to do it in the old, pre 11g, days:

Installing Oracle Multimedia, which is required for Spatial and/or Locator is quite simple. All of the following must be carried out while logged in as a SYSDBA user. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 SQL> spool ordinst.log SQL> @?/ord/admin/ordinst SYSAUX SYSAUX ... ... SQL> spool off SQL> spool catim.log SQL> @?/ord/im/admin/catim ... ... SQL> spool off Lots of stuff will scroll up the screen but will also be copied to the spool files named.

So, you renamed your database using the nid utility as outlined here but now you need (or want) to change all the file system names to suit. Read on. In the following example, we have two mount points for the database. Files on these mounts are spread all over a pile of separate discs making up the LUN - so it’s not as bad as it looks! The two mounts are wrongly named at the moment since we changed the database name using nid and we would like to tidy things up.

As you already know, an Oracle database’s PMON process will register your database with a listener without you having to do anything about it. However … This will only happen if the listener in question is running on port 1521. And it doesn’t have to be named LISTENER either – as I mistakenly thought– it only has to be port 1521. If you have a listener running on port 1521, and you have databases configured to connect via different listeners on other ports (on the same server) then your databases will be grabbed by the 1521 listener!

It was my own fault, but in case it proves even slightly useful…. I was upgrading from 11202 to 11203 Enterprise using the DB Upgrade Assistant utility. When I said ‘go do it’ it went off, chugged for a bit, then barfed. DBUA informed me that the database wasn’t running. I checked, it was. Cutting a long story short, I checked the indicated logfile and discovered that DBUA had connected to the database but then got a couple of errors telling it that ‘oracle was not available’.

Locator is “Spatial Lite” if you wish, and costs nothing. It can be installed in Standard or Enterprise Editions with no additional licensing costs. You cannot do everything in Locator that you can in Spatial - but what do you expect for free? ;-) To install Locator you need to be aware that things changed at 11g, so what used to work on 10g no longer does on 11g and can lead to you having a huge mess of objects and types to hunt down and remove from your SYS account - ask me how I know!

In the previous instalment of this exciting series, we completed the full (complete) recovery of the database, tablespaces and data files, as well as looking at recovering individual blocks. In this article, we will perform incomplete recovery where we restore and recover the databases to a specific point in time that is previous to “now”. Note that in the following examples I’m using the until time option and specifying a date and time.

It’s supposed to be installed by default, according to the documentation, but for some reason or another, I managed to build a brand new 11.2 database, on Linux, with no CTXSYS user present. Installing Context Here’s how to install Oracle Text and the English language defaults, into an 11.2 database. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 SQL> connect / as SYSDBA SQL> spool ctxsys_installation.

When installing the Pro*C compiler stuff (technical term) from the 11.2.0.3 client install disc (it’s in zipfile 4 or 7 in case you need to know!) I hit a strange error almost immediately the installer started the GUI. I don’t have a screen dump, but the error message was the following: vbOEL.dunbar-it.co.uk:vbOEL.dunbar-it.co.uk In other words, my fully qualified Linux x86-64bit server name, vbOEL.dunbar-it.co.uk, twice. Interesting. No buttons were present to allow me to carry on, abort etc.