Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

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CHAPTER 5 SOFTWARE INSTALLATION
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The Forgotten Manuals
Beginning with Oracle Database 8, Oracle discontinued the practice of providing free
printed copies of reference manuals to customers who purchased database licenses. In
the early days of the Internet, when broadband access was not common, Oracle put the
manuals on a CD. Today, broadband access is the rule, and you can search and read
the manuals online; they are available in both HTML and PDF format. For convenience,
you can also download selected manuals—or the entire set of manuals—to your laptop
computer for offline reading. You can purchase printed copies of the manuals at
, but be warned that they are immense. Oracle Database 11g SQL
Language Reference alone is almost 1,500 pages, twice the size of the Oracle Database 7
version.
The manuals for Oracle Database 11g are available at
; the manuals for older database versions are also available, all
the way back to Oracle Database 7. 1 For this chapter, you need the installation guides for
your operating system—separate guides are available for client installations and server
installations.
Note A short version of the guide, labeled a Quick Installation Guide, is also available in each case; it covers
the most common scenarios. The quick installation guide for Windows is only 14 pages long.
Prerequisites and Preinstallation Requirements
You will need to pay attention to the sections of the installation guides that discuss prerequisites
and preinstallation requirements. If you have chosen a complex architecture
such as Real Application Clusters (RAC), these prerequisites will themselves be fairly
complex; they are outside the scope of this introductory work.
In a Unix or Linux environment, you will need to install and run Oracle using a dedicated
account. In a Windows environment, you can use any account belonging to the
Administrators group. In Unix and Linux environments, you will have to solve the problems
of mounting the product disks and enabling an X Windows environment for the
1. You can also find manuals for other Oracle offerings including Application Server, BEA, E- Business
Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Retek, and database technologies such as Times Ten, Berkeley DB,
Oracle Rdb, and CODASYL DBMS.