Oradim hangs in Oracle XE when creating new service

Question

Using Oracle XE 10g on W2003 Server (64-bit), R2.
I'm attempting to install/create a new database instance...
The initial installation of XE itself and the subsequent XE instance was successful. Now, i'm attempting to create another instance/database...
The problem is when i use the oradim command (shown below), it simply hangs and never returns to the prompt.
oradim -new -sid XYZ -startmode M
I've tried various combinations of parameters, but get the same problem...oradim hangs!
It does, however, create the service. But, when i try to start the service from the Services console, windows gives me a "service specific error #183".
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Schemas (Oracle userids) are separate logical entities within an instance, so if you create one user called 'bill', and another user called 'jer' they both can have individual objects of the same name. Let's say both users create a table called 'table', the only way jer can look at bill's table is by specifying bill.table (unless there is a synonym in place, but that's a discussion for another time). This way the objects are separated. MySQL calls them Databases, in MS Access you'd have a separate (possibly linked) MDB, etc. Oracle instances are different in that instances can't occupy the same memory space, you actually spawn separate server processes for each instance. It would be like running two copies of mysqld on your machine.
That's why I was asking if you couldn't simply use a separate schema for your applications. I've never installed Siebel before, but it may have the option to specify a schema name. Then again, it may not. Siebel is something large enough that you would typically put it on it's own instance ;)
~Jer