Yesterday I installed the Oracle Database 11gR1 for the first time. I realize that I'm not quite the first one since the database is allready available for over a year. But I did not find a quick step-by-step guide that covers it all.

About the same counts for installing the SoaSuite 10.1.3.3. On the eve of the release of 11g (will it finaly be launched at Open World in September?), I give you this install guide for the SoaSuite on Oracle Enterprise Linux and against the 11gR1 database. Since 10g is used pretty much I think it will be around for a while.

The installation fo the SoaSuite is pretty much straight forward. But there are a few prerequisites to meet.

11g Database
To work with an 11g database there are 2 things to do:

• Download patch 6265268 for the Oracle Universal Installer to work with DB11g. Apparently the OUI has two older libraries that do not work properly with DB11g. Unzip the patch and copy the files to the proper directory on the installation disk (so if you have a real CD, or an ISO with the installation you should copy the contents to a directory on a harddrive). The readme denotes the files and their destination. I found a little mismatch in the foldernaming of one of them, my installation disk had a slightly different version number in the path.

• Edit the irca.sh. The irca.sh that has to be run for creating the SoaSchema's in the database refer to the jdbc libraries of the database home. It expects a ojdbc14.jar, but this one does not exist in the 11g home. But I found it works fine with the ojdbc5.jar that does exist. So edit the irca.sh, search for ojdbc. You'll find an if-statement that checks for the existing of ojdbc14.jar. Uncomment it or change ojdbc14.jar to ojdbc5.jar. Search further for ojdbc to find the classpath and change it accordingly.

Oracle Enterprise Linux

Oracle Enterprise linux should also be adapted. First you should install the libXP package. I found it on Disk 2 of the OEL5.0 diskset.

rpm -ivh libXp.*version*.i386.rpm

or

rpm -ivh libXp-*

(I found that on my disk there is a hyphen '-' in stead of a dot '.' after LibXp)

The second thing to do I found in a doc on Metalink, where is stated that a library has to be replaced to get the HTTP server started.
The document is Note:465159.1 - "Oracle Application Server 10g (10.1.3) Requirements for Linux (OEL 5 and RHEL 5) "

The patch it is tacking about is Patch 6078836. This is a zip with a a special system library (libdb.so.2) which has to be replaced. In my case the original was not available (I had a libdb.so in stead of libdb.so.2), so I added it, having two versions together. So I don't know if it's really needed.

The installer

Then the Oracle Universal Installer won't start as is, since it does not recognize OEL as a valid OS. There are two options.

The simplest is adding the is starting runInstaller with the option '-ignoreSysPrereqs'. But you can also optain the patch 6339508 for the Oracle SOA Suite (10.1.3.1.0). It contains a prereq directory and a parameter file. The readme neatly states how the runInstaller has to be started.

The note:465159.1 also states that "The Oracle Application Server 10g Patch Set 3 (10.1.3.3) is required to be certified on OEL 5.x. This is available on OracleMetalink as Patch 6148874".

This is an Oracle Universal Installer that upgrades the SoaSuites and has the same problem as the SoaSuite 10.13.1 installer. For that Patch 6452684 is available that has only a parameter file. But you could easily also use the '-ignoreSysPrereqs' parameter.

If you want to install Oracle Webcenter, apparently about the same problems arise. So follow the Note 465159.1 to solve that.