Minimun requirements to UP an oracle instance

Question

Hi
I have an image of Oracle 9i with RedHat EL 4. Oracle has been installed but not yet configured. Thats meant there is no any SID's , Tns, Lisners defined. Just for start and test instance , i have created a SID called "PROD" and setup other parameters in tnsnames and lisnters in certain files.
But when I'm trying to start the instance by "dbstart" command , i was getting certain init file not found message.
It seems , to get start an instance , there should be an init file created. How can we do it manually ?
and could you please tell me , what are basic/minimum requirements to get up an instance in oracle 9i ?
Many Thanks
Luke

Answer 1

You must
a. PreCreate the other database (the one where you want to import to)
b. PreCreat all the Tablespces in that databases (the Tablespace names must be the same as in the source databse but Tablespace storage parameters and datafile sizes can be different -- database file names, obviously, must be different if this database is to run on the same server)
optionally
a. PreCreate the users with the same roles and system privileges as granted in the source system
b. Manually synchronise SEQUENCE values by doing a DROP and CREATE in the new database after an import (this is in case they have got incremented in the source database since the export)
very optionally
a. PreCreate Tables and Indexes -- this is in case you want to pre-allocate extents to the tables and/or have them created in different tablespaces fom those they exist in in the source database
When you do a FULL export and import, it copies the
CREATE USER statements -- which you may want
CREATE TABLESPACE statements -- which you want to avoid. However, if you don't pre-create them, Oracle will attempt to recreate them with datafiles in the same location as in the source databse -- which will fail. (A caveate : If you run the import with the DESTROY option, importing into the new database without precreating tablespaces can cause Oracle to overwrite and corrupt your source database as it attempt to create the datafiles !)
CREATE TABLE statements -- which you migh pre-run to change storage / tablespaces
Hemant K Chitale
http://hemantoracledba.blogspot.com