Oracle 11gR2 XE - "Database Configuration failed."

calendar Mar 10, 2013 · 2 min read · oracle  ·
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Recently I had problems with installing Oracle 11gR2 Express Edition on CentOS 6.4.

The installation of the RPM package worked but the database configuration crash with the following error:

1# service oracle-xe configure
2...
3"Database Configuration failed.  Look into /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/config/log for details"

The log file wasn't very helpful because it showed no explicit hint - but I found a lot of entries with the following error code:

1ORA-01034: ORACLE not available

This can be originated from amongst others:

Swap memory

If you used the swap trick before installation of the database (to avoid the dubious swap requirements) and rebootet before configurating the database you'll have to re-enable the swap file. With the following commands a 1.5 GB file is created and formatted/used as swap memory - using this you can circumvent the Oracle database installation:

1# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/swap.bin bs=1024k count=1536
2# mkswap /tmp/swap.bin
3# swapon /tmp/swap.bin

Name resolution

During the database configuration the hostname/IP address of the system needs to be resolvable. If DNS or your local hosts file /etc/hosts is erroneous the configuration will fail.

1# vi /etc/hosts
2...
3127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost hostname.domain hostname

Disk space for /u01

It is senseful to serve at leat 2 GB of free space to the filesystem which holds /u01. During the database configuration additional space is needed.

1# df -h /u01
2Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
3/dev/mapper/vg_bla-lv_u01
4                      2.5G  1.7G  682M  72% /u01

After modifying the /etc/hosts file the configuration was executing fine on my system.

1# service oracle-xe configure
2...
3Installation Completed Successfully.

Oracle 11gR2 XE APEX

During another setup where I wanted to install the Oracle database beside other services on a system, the database couldn't be configured at all.

The installation and configuration worked but SQLPlus couldn't create a database connection at any circumstances:

1# source /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/bin/oracle_env.sh
2# sqlplus SYSTEM/...
3...
4Error: ORA-01033 ORACLE initialization or shutdown in progress
5
6# sqlplus "/ as sysdba"
7...
8Error: ORA-01033 ORACLE initialization or shutdown in progress

I created a second system in the same configuration and did the whole configuration step by step equally to the first system. The only thing I changed was the order for the Oracle database - I installed the database first before installing the other services. I can't get behind the reason for the failure on the first syste.m

So - if you plan to install an Oracle database additionally on a system, install it first - this saves a lot of time if you have to reinstall..

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