Installation Tips For Oracle 9iAS On Windows

"I'm an Oracle developer who wants to get into some of the "newer" technologies that Oracle offers. I want to get Oracle 9iAS, Portal, Forms services etc up and running on my PC. I'm going to get a PC that can handle this. Do you have any articles on how to install IAS on a single PC running Windows NT, XP etc?

I just want to get the stuff working without having all the hassle of knowing all the fiddly bits that DBAs have to learn. I'm a bit apprehensive of trying to do this because I can see numerous late nights getting TCP/IP port settings correct and never getting it working! I'm not really interested in all that stuff really - but I just want to get it installed (if possible), so I can start
learning."

If you're looking for a straightforward set of instructions for installation Oracle 9iAS R2 on Windows, there's an Oracle 9iAS 9.0.2.0.1 Installation Cookbook available on Metalink that should be useful.

In addition, the best source of comprehensive install instructions I've found is actually the online Microsoft Windows Installation Guide available on OTN.

My golden rules to remember when doing a 9iASr2 install are

1. Make sure your PC has at least 1GB of RAM and about 20GB of free disk space.
2. Make sure your PC has a fully qualified hostname.domain name, like officepc.rittman.net
3. Make sure your PC has a static IP address, i.e. the IP address isn't assigned via DHCP
4. Install the infrastructure layer first, write down the passwords you use, then check everything still works after a reboot (i.e. the EMWebsite comes up and the OC4J instances actually start up
5. Then install the mid-tier layer, refer back to the password you used, then check everything still works after a reboot.
6. Put some scripts together to selectively start up, stop and restart the OC4J instances you actually need to use (i.e. don't start them all, as you'll waste too much memory)
7. Read up on OID, oidmon and oidctl, and work out how to stop and start OID. If your PC crashes and 9iAS did not shut down cleanly, you often need to cleanly shut down OID using oidctl before you can then restart the 9iAS components.
8. Apply the 9.0.2.3 patchset as soon as possible, as the base unpatched install has a issue that can mean you have to reinstall everything if your DCM repository gets corrupted (all too easy when you alternate between DCMCTL and EMWebsite to control the OC4J instances)
9. Read up on the different layers in the 9iAS architecture - 9iAS only starts to make sense once you've worked out what OID, OPMN, DCM, OC4J, Portal, EMWebsite and so on actually do. It's well worth it if you want to really start to work with 9ias.
10. And finally, consider installing Oracle Application Server 10g when it comes out for Windows - reports on the Unix versions say that it's actually much easier to install and manage that 9iAS.