Some notes about Oracle installation in silent mode

A while ago Grégory Guillou from Pythian Group published a nice serie of posts about using some Oracle utilities (like oui,dbca,dbua,netca) in silent mode. For dba’s who perform a lot maintenance tasks – install,configure,patch – this technique is a huge timesaver ( at least it is in my experience ). As he stated himself, there is a ton of things more, one can do with these tools, which can’t be covered in a blog post ( or even in a couple of them).

I was looking how to add individual components to an existing oracle home in silent mode – maybe, this requirement come not so often, because the enterprise or custom install types include the majority of the options. But connection manager and oracle label security (to name only two, i was interested in) are not installed per default. So, the first approach was – install interactively and record the response file. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work – installer doesn’t record selected options doing the custom install. There is a Metalink Note 314025.1 , which suggests, the issue to be fixed in later versions of oui, but in my test with the version bundled with database 11gR1 it was still not working.

As opposite to examples provided by Grégory, this type of installation requires custom response file (at least, in my test the relevant parameters – DEPENDENCY_LIST – were not accepted as command line switches). Finally, this worked for me to install the mentioned two options on an enterprise 10.2.0.1 installation (assumed, the database software is unzipped into /opt/oracle/stage/database) :

cat << eof >options.rsp
RESPONSEFILE_VERSION=2.2.1.0.0
oracle.options:DEPENDENCY_LIST={"oracle.rdbms.lbac:10.2.0.1.0"}
oracle.network:DEPENDENCY_LIST={"oracle.network.cman:10.2.0.1.0"}
eof

WORK=/opt/oracle/stage
DIST=$WORK/database
RESP=$WORK/options.rsp
$DIST/runInstaller -silent                        \
-responseFile $RESP                               \
FROM_LOCATION=$DIST/stage/products.xml            \
ORACLE_HOME="/opt/oracle/product/10.2.0.4"        \
ORACLE_HOME_NAME="OraDb10g_home4"                 \
TOPLEVEL_COMPONENT={"oracle.server","10.2.0.1.0"} \
DEINSTALL_LIST={"oracle.server","10.2.0.1.0"}     \
COMPONENT_LANGUAGES={"en","de","ru"}              \
INSTALL_TYPE="Custom"

To verify

opatch lsinventory -detail|grep -i "connection\|label"
Oracle Connection Manager                                            10.2.0.1.0
Oracle Label Security                                                10.2.0.1.0

Of course, if the components should be installed on the oracle home already patched, after the installation the patchset should be applied again.