Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Don't Start Up Oracle Instance as Root User in Unix

It's been a while since I stopped blogging. That is because I've been quite busy this semester with school and work. Right now, I'm taking some classes at the Houston Community College in order to get a MSA (Marketable Skills Achievement Certificate) in Oracle Database Administration as well as a MSA in Java Development.

About 1 months ago, when I was doing one of my Oracle Administration practices, I started up the Oracle Database instance as a root user. After having started up the instance, I started up the Enterprise Management Console (Web-based Oracle Configuration Management Tool), but it didn't get up because the oracle process couldn't log information about the initialization of the EM Console.

I called my instructor to help me out with this problem, and after checking out, we realized that some of the $ORACLE_HOME directories had different permissions because I had started up the instance with a user that doesn't belong to the DBA users.

When you install Oracle Database, you need to set up the OS Environment and create OS users that will perform Oracle Installation. I couldn't get the EM Console up because I previously started up the Oracle Database instance with OS root user, which didn't have written permissions in $ORACLE_HOME directories. In other words

"DO NOT START UP THE ORACLE DATABASE INSTANCE LOGGING IN AS ROOT USER AT LEAST THE ROOT USER BELONGS TO THE OS DB USER GROUP"