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The basic installation instructions for the Oracle software products are contained in the Installation and Configuration Guide. This document is specific to the operating system and Oracle product release level with which you are working. Never assume that you can follow the same instructions for installing Oracle 8.1 on an IBM RS/6000 that you used to install Oracle8 on an HP H50. This is almost guaranteed to fail. Both Oracle and the operating system are constantly changing.
The exact contents of this manual vary somewhat with each release and with each specific operating system, but the layout is similar to the following:
The overview section presents a very brief discussion of how to lay out your Oracle database and tools. It presents the standard layout that Oracle recommends for disk files. It also presents some of the issues that you will run across. Finally, it discusses the components of the Oracle server, which may vary as new releases of the product come out, so it is not a waste of time to spend a half hour reading this section.
The requirements section is very important when installing the software for the first time. Sometimes I wish that they shipped this section to you when you are planning your purchase. Unfortunately, you usually get the Installation and Configuration Guide when the software arrives and everyone is breathing down your neck to have the database ready by that afternoon. This section offers a number of tables that you can copy and fill in to determine the amount of disk and memory space required by the products and the number of users that you are expecting. It also has a list of requirements for each of the products that you should validate before you begin the installation process.
The next section is also important. It provides you with the issues and restrictions that are applicable to your particular release of Oracle and your operating system. The available capacity for such parameters as maximum number of extents in a table vary with the operating system that you are using. This is all internals stuff that the Oracle developers have to decide on when they are performing the port of the Oracle software to your operating system. You do not have a vote in the matter; you merely have to note what these restrictions are and live with them. You get to control how you set up your parameters, up to the limits imposed by the developers for your operating system.
Preinstallation activities involve the system administrator who needs to set up accounts, groups, and directories that you can use during the installation. There are several per-mission grants that only the system administrator can perform because Oracle tries to do things with memory areas and file permissions that are typically restricted to the operating system utilities. This is part of the price that has to be paid to get improved performance. These activities are important and should be added to your plan when you prepare it.
The actual installation chapters deal with the tasks that you will perform on the day of installation. There are separate chapters for the RDBMS products and the development tools, CASE products, and so forth. This makes good sense because you do not have to install the development products on the server in environments such as client/server. Also, you can have installations wherein the development tools may be linked to a database on another server via Net/8. I have always found the RDBMS installation to be more challenging, with the other products usually linking into the environment.
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