1. Installation Guide
  2. Installing Oracle Database
  3. Reviewing Component-Specific Installation Guidelines

Reviewing Component-Specific Installation Guidelines

Review the following guidelines before starting Oracle Universal Installer:

  • Oracle Universal Installer

    Do not use Oracle Universal Installer from an earlier Oracle release to install components from this release.

  • Oracle Automatic Storage Management

    In previous releases, Oracle Automatic Storage Management (Oracle ASM) was installed as part of the Oracle Database installation. With Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2), Oracle Automatic Storage Management is part of an Oracle Grid Infrastructure installation, either for a cluster, or for a standalone server.

    If you want to upgrade an existing Oracle Automatic Storage Management installation, then you must upgrade Oracle Automatic Storage Management by running an Oracle Grid Infrastructure upgrade. If you do not have Oracle Automatic Storage Management installed and you want to use Oracle Automatic Storage Management as your storage option, then you must complete an Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a standalone server installation before you start your Oracle Database installation.

  • Installations on a cluster

    If Oracle Clusterware or Oracle RAC is installed on the system, then Oracle Universal Installer displays the Grid Installation Options page. You must select Single instance database installation, unless you want to install Oracle RAC. The other options on the page are Oracle Real Application Clusters database installation and Oracle RAC One Node database installation.

    See Also:

    Oracle Real Application Clusters Installation Guide

About Character Set Selection During Installation

Review character set options before you start the installation.

After a database is created, changing its character set is usually very expensive in terms of time and resources. Such operations may require converting all character data by exporting the whole database and importing it back. Therefore, it is important that you carefully select the database character set during installation.

Oracle Database uses character sets for the following:

  • Data stored in SQL character datatypes (CHAR, VARCHAR2, CLOB, and LONG).

  • Identifiers such as table names, column names, and PL/SQL variables.

  • Stored SQL and PL/SQL source code, including text literals embedded in this code.

Starting with Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2), the default database character set of a database created from the General Purpose/Transaction Processing or the Data Warehousing template is Unicode AL32UTF8. Oracle recommends that you use Unicode AL32UTF8 as the database character set.

Unicode is the universal character set that supports most of the currently spoken languages of the world. It also supports many historical scripts (alphabets). Unicode is the native encoding of many technologies, including Java, XML, XHTML, ECMAScript, and LDAP. Unicode is ideally suited for databases supporting the Internet and the global economy.

Because AL32UTF8 is a multibyte character set, database operations on character data may be slightly slower when compared to single-byte database character sets, such as WE8MSWIN1252. Storage space requirements for text in most languages that use characters outside of the ASCII repertoire are higher in AL32UTF8 compared to legacy character sets supporting the language. Storage for non-character data types, such as NUMBER or DATE, does not depend on a character set. The universality and flexibility of Unicode usually outweighs these additional costs.

Note:

English data may require more space only if stored in CLOB columns

The database character set of a multitenant container database (CDB) determines which databases can be plugged in later. Ensure that the character set you choose for the CDB is compatible with the database character sets of the databases to be plugged into this CDB.

See Also:

Oracle Database Globalization Support Guide

Using an Oracle Automatic Storage Management Disk Group

Learn how to identify disk groups and determine the available free disk space.

You can store either database or recovery files in an existing Oracle Automatic Storage Management disk group that you created during the Oracle Grid Infrastructure for a standalone server installation.

Note:

The Oracle Automatic Storage Management instance that manages the existing disk group runs in a different Oracle home directory.

  1. In the Services Control Panel, ensure that the OracleASMService+ASM service has started.

  2. Open command prompt and temporarily set the ORACLE_SID environment variable to specify the appropriate value for the Oracle Automatic Storage Management instance.

    For example, if the Oracle Automatic Storage Management SID, which is named +ASM, is located in the asm directory, then enter the following setting: 

    DRIVE_LETTER:\>set ORACLE_SID=+ASM

  3. Connect to the Oracle Automatic Storage Management instance as the SYS user with the SYSASM privilege and start the instance if necessary: 

    DRIVE_LETTER:\>sqlplus /nolog
SQL> CONNECT SYS as SYSASM
Enter password: SYS_password 
SQL> STARTUP

  4. Enter the following command to view the existing disk groups, their redundancy level, and the amount of free disk space in each one:

    SQL> SELECT NAME,TYPE,TOTAL_MB,FREE_MB FROM V$ASM_DISKGROUP;

  5. From the output, identify a disk group with the appropriate redundancy level and note the free space that it contains.

  6. If necessary, install, or identify the additional disk devices required to meet the storage requirements.

    Note:

    If you are adding devices to an existing disk group, then Oracle recommends that you use devices that have the same size and performance characteristics as the existing devices in that disk group.