Oracle Corner

The Oracle 10g installation is much more sleek than the installations in previous Oracle versions. For a start, there is only 1 CD required to install the basic Oracle software. It takes about 15 minutes to install Oracle Standard Edition and a bit more than 1Gb in disk space. Another CD, called "a companion CD" is then used to add additional features like HTML DB with HTTP server, JDBC drivers, SQLJ, Examples, JPublisher, Oracle Text, etc.

I also prefer adding SQL Developer, which is an excellent free tool for general data browsing and running SQL.

After the installation you will notice couple of new services:

• OracleOraDB10giSQL*Plus for web-based SQL*Plus
  
• Manual iSQL*Plus is with
  
• >isqlplusctl start
• iSQL*Plus can be accessed at http://server:5560/isqlplus
  
• OraceJobScheduler10g service is disabled by default. If you want to enable it, run it with a low-privleged OS account to secure the external jobs
  
• OracleCSService, a clustering server, which can be safely stopped if you don't plan to use clustering
• OracleDBConsole is an Enterprize Manager console
  

I personally like installing the software first, checking the installation and then creating a new database. If you use DBCA to create a new database, the whole process takes less than half an hour and a basic database takes 1Gb of space.
Oracle 10g has a list of instance parameters that you can set up and off you go. The following list of initial instance parameters will give you a reasonable database to start with:

• Memory parameters:
• sga_target (the value depends on memory availability and application reqs)
• pga_aggregate_target (the same as above)
• sga_max_size (sga_target+100M, if you can afford it)
  
• processes (as required)
  
• Management parameters:
• auti_Trail=db_extended (get the SQL statements and bind variables in auditing)
• statistics_level=TYPICAL (Enable ADDM and automatic statistics)
• resumable_timeout=3600 (1 hour wait for DBA to resume imports)
• General bdump, udump, cdump, control files, undo
  
• timed_os_statistics. This is a bit expensive parameter, so you can switch it off if you can't afford any extra CPU consumption.
  
• Recovery parameters:
• db_flashback_retention_target=1440
  
• don't forget to mount and 'ALTER DATABASE FLASHBACK ON;'
  
• db_recovery_file_dest and db_recovery_file_dest_size
  
• archive_lag_target=1800 (force a switch every 30 minutes)
• log_archive_dest_2= 'location=/mounted_remote_server_dir optional reopen=300'
  
• The above 2 parameters give the cheapest DR strategy
  

Make sure your database has the default tablespace defined and you can also do some of the following:

• Enable row movement for relevant tables to be able to shrink space
• Set up alerts' e-mailing with DBMS_SERVER_ALERT
• Switch your older scripts from using imp/exp to Data Pump
  

To manually start your EM console, type

• > emctl start dbconsole
• The default URL is http://server:1158/em
• Don't forget that all EM packs have to be paid for, but you can use the EM console for basic work.