Installing Oracle Spatial

Note

According to the installation documentation, the only versions of Linux that are supported are Red Hat Enterprise 2.1/3.0 and UnitedLinux. It is not clear whether the proposed system (running Red Hat 9.0) will be appropriate. JonBlower has emailed Dave Pearson of Oracle about this and is awaiting a reply. However, the author of http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle10g.shtml seems to have successfully installed 10g on Red Hat 9.0 (although doesn't mention Spatial).

Downloading the binaries

In order to download Oracle 10g and Spatial, one must register on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN, http://otn.oracle.com). One can then follow the links on the OTN to the download page - a few forms need to be filled in. I (JonBlower) found that I was unable to download these files with Mozilla 1.5 under Red Hat 9.0 - the download kept dying midway through. In the end, I used IE6.0 under Windows and burned CDs of the distribution.

Installing the Oracle database and Spatial

This was surprisingly easy - I just followed the instructions in http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle10g.shtml to the letter (except that reference to ~oracle/.bash_profile should have read ~oracle/.bashrc for my system). No other libraries needed to be installed.

I unlocked the "SCOTT" user account and used it to log in to the database and create a table. All appeared fine. So far, it seems that Oracle 10g/Spatial works fine under Red Hat 9.

Problems

Unable to log on to database - disk full

A matter of hours after installing Oracle, we were unable to log on to the database. This seemed to be because the disk was full, despite having more than enough (12GB) free before installation. Tracked this down to a couple of files in /u01/app/oracle/admin/test/bdump. One (test_pmon_6356.trc) was 8.2GB in size and seemed to be full of messages saying "PMON unable to acquire latch 59abce74 library cache lock allocation". Another file (test_j001_6389.trc) was 2GB in size and full of error messages. I deleted both these files. Now I can log on using iSQL*Plus (http://<host>:5560/isqlplus) - I didn't have to restart the computer or Oracle.

-- JonBlower - 01 Mar 2004