Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I finally finished downloading the three Portal and Wireless AS10g Disks
earlier today, together with the two Business Intelligence AS10g disks and the
Business Intelligence Tools disk. Here’s how the installation went.

As with AS10g Release 1, I made sure I had around 20GB of free hard disk
space on my laptop, and with 2GB of RAM this is usually OK. I’ve got Windows XP
Professional SP2 which officially isn’t supported, but as it’s on the laptop
anyway I thought I’d give it a go before going through the process of installing
Windows 2000 or Windows 2003. I”ll go on to it later but the upshot of this is
that I’ve not had any problems.

The first disks I installed were the AS10g Release 2 Portal and Wireless
disks [1,2,3]
as I guess (rightly it turns out) that these would contain the infrastructure
install. After unzipping the files to three directorys (Disk1, Disk2 and Disk3)
I ran the installer on Disk 1 and eventually the install options page came up.

Obviously what’s happening here is that these three disks
contain two AS10g tiers; the infrastructure tier, and a mid-tier containing
Portal and Wireless, together with the AS Developer Kits. I selected the
OracleAS Infrastructure Tier and was presented with the following option:

What we’re being given here is the choice of installing the
infrastructure database together with OID, just OID or just the infrastructure
database. I selected the first option (to install both at the same time) and
went on to the next stage of the install.

A couple of steps on a rather scary-looking dialog box came up,
asking me about the service running on port 1521.

I guess what’s going on here is that the installer has detected
something listening on 1521 (the regular port for Oracle databases) and is
checking that it’s a 10g database - given that the infrastructure database about
to be installed is a 10g 10.1.0.3 database, I know I’ve had problems getting 10g
databases to automatically register with 9i listeners, so what’s happening here
is that the installer is only going to add the infrastructure database to a 10g
listener, which it knows will go ok.

After a couple more questions to do with OID, the familiar SID
and Service Name screen for the 10g database comes up, which obviously means
we’re about to go into the infrastructure database install (10g release
10.1.0.3).

After that it was just a case of naming the infrastructure
instance, setting the password and kicking off the install.

Once this part of the install has completed, you then go through
the configuration stage (which went ok) and then make a note of the URLs and
port numbers that have been assigned.

Now the infrastructure has been installed, the next step is to
install the Portal and Wireless mid-tier, which you do by running the installer
on Disk1 again, and this time select the Oracle Application Server 10g option.

The Portal install goes through as with earlier releases without
any problems (although a warning comes up that this mid-tier isn’t supported on
Windows XP). One issue that did crop up during the setup of the Portal install
was that it wasn’t immediately obvious which port number my OID instance was
running on - the two numbers (SSL and Non-SSL) suggested in the online help
didn’t work and in the end I had to log on to the EM Website for the
infrastructure instance and retrieve the OID port number from there (which isn’t
the end of the world, but everything so far had been so easy)

.

After installing the Infrastructure tier and the Portal
mid-tier, the next install was the Business Intelligence mid-tier
[1,2].
On earlier Application Server releases both Portal
and Discoverer had been on the same mid-tier, but now they’re separated out - as
is Forms and Reports, which means that if you want Portal, Discoverer and
Reports, you’ve going to have to install four separate AS10g tiers. First of all
a quick check of Enterprise Manager for the infrastructure and Portal tiers…

and then off with the install. As with the
Infrastructure and Portal installs, the BI install went without any problems.

So now it was time to test out Discoverer Drake. The first thing
you need to do with Drake (if you’re going to use the OLAP Option) is to fire up
Enterprise Manager, install the Discoverer Catalog, and authorise the schemas
that will contain data that Discoverer will analyze.

Then it’s just a case of starting up Discoverer Plus, selecting
the Discoverer Plus OLAP Option, logging in and then bringing up Discoverer
Drake.

One point I noted was that, like earlier AS releases, Discoverer
by default doesn’t use SSO, so you have to log on twice using your Discoverer
username rather than Discoverer just falling back to the standard SSO login
page. Going into Discoverer Plus OLAP you notice the new look and feel (compared
to the beta) but other than that it’s pretty much as you’d expect.

The total size of the install was 2.38GB for the software,
another 1.66GB for the infrastructure database (total of 4.04GB). The start menu
has two entries for each of the tiers (a standard Oracle Home entry, and a tier
control entry) with menu items for starting and stopping each tier instance

.

That’s it for now, more news as I get to play around with the
various bits more.

Posted in Application Server |