"But wait, I'm a DBA, not a software installer," so you say. True, you may be the DBA, but whom else to turn to when it comes to anything having to do with Oracle? More often than not, the DBA owns everything related to Oracle, whether or not the DBA has anything to do with that "other" Oracle stuff. Additionally, it is not uncommon to find people working in DBA/developer positions, so shake off the narrow-minded view about what a DBA does and expand your knowledge of Oracle's installation process.

The previous article included a suggested outline of the installation process. You will find that when it comes to Oracle products, database or otherwise, the outline works just the same.

A general outline of installation steps

The seven steps shown below are the same steps from the Oracle9i installation cookbook.

1.      Verify that hardware and software minimums are met or exceeded

2.      Prepare or update the operating system

3.      Create administrative/owner accounts and file structures

4.      Reserve, specify, or designate disk space

5.      Start the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI) and provide information as necessary

6.      Perform post-installation tasks

7.      Test your installation

The first four steps can be considered as pre-installation tasks, step five as THE installation task and steps six and seven as post-installation tasks. Moreover, as I stated in the previous article, I like to include an introduction along with a list of assumptions or standards, and a list of references from which the information was drawn.

As an added bonus, you can include a short troubleshooting section at the end of the installation guide. Including this section begs the question of, "Why those particular problems and not others?" Part of that comes from personal experience and observation. Experience, of course, comes from making mistakes, so that's part of the answer, and the observation part may stem from having observed others (customers) make those mistakes or face similar problems.

The next article in this series will discuss some additional planning considerations and ways to "dummy up" the inventory location. This comes in handy when working with different versions of the Oracle Universal Installer.

Therefore, without further ado, here is a detailed, step-by-step installation cookbook for installing Oracle Forms & Reports 6i on a Sun Solaris platform.

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