Taking A First Look At Application Server 10g Release 2

Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting
Mark Rittman

I finally finished downloading the three Portal and Wireless AS10g Disks earlier today, together with the two Business Intelligence AS10g disks and the Business Intelligence Tools disk. Here's how the installation went.

As with AS10g Release 1, I made sure I had around 20GB of free hard disk space on my laptop, and with 2GB of RAM this is usually OK. I've got Windows XP Professional SP2 which officially isn't supported, but as it's on the laptop anyway I thought I'd give it a go before going through the process of installing Windows 2000 or Windows 2003. I''ll go on to it later but the upshot of this is that I've not had any problems.

The first disks I installed were the AS10g Release 2 Portal and Wireless disks [1,2,3] as I guess (rightly it turns out) that these would contain the infrastructure install. After unzipping the files to three directorys (Disk1, Disk2 and Disk3) I ran the installer on Disk 1 and eventually the install options page came up.

Obviously what's happening here is that these three disks contain two AS10g tiers; the infrastructure tier, and a mid-tier containing Portal and Wireless, together with the AS Developer Kits. I selected the OracleAS Infrastructure Tier and was presented with the following option:

What we're being given here is the choice of installing the infrastructure database together with OID, just OID or just the infrastructure database. I selected the first option (to install both at the same time) and went on to the next stage of the install.

A couple of steps on a rather scary-looking dialog box came up, asking me about the service running on port 1521.

I guess what's going on here is that the installer has detected something listening on 1521 (the regular port for Oracle databases) and is checking that it's a 10g database - given that the infrastructure database about to be installed is a 10g 10.1.0.3 database, I know I've had problems getting 10g databases to automatically register with 9i listeners, so what's happening here is that the installer is only going to add the infrastructure database to a 10g listener, which it knows will go ok.

After a couple more questions to do with OID, the familiar SID and Service Name screen for the 10g database comes up, which obviously means we're about to go into the infrastructure database install (10g release 10.1.0.3).

After that it was just a case of naming the infrastructure instance, setting the password and kicking off the install.

Once this part of the install has completed, you then go through the configuration stage (which went ok) and then make a note of the URLs and port numbers that have been assigned.

Now the infrastructure has been installed, the next step is to install the Portal and Wireless mid-tier, which you do by running the installer on Disk1 again, and this time select the Oracle Application Server 10g option.

The Portal install goes through as with earlier releases without any problems (although a warning comes up that this mid-tier isn't supported on Windows XP). One issue that did crop up during the setup of the Portal install was that it wasn't immediately obvious which port number my OID instance was running on - the two numbers (SSL and Non-SSL) suggested in the online help didn't work and in the end I had to log on to the EM Website for the infrastructure instance and retrieve the OID port number from there (which isn't the end of the world, but everything so far had been so easy)

After installing the Infrastructure tier and the Portal mid-tier, the next install was the Business Intelligence mid-tier [1,2]. On earlier Application Server releases both Portal and Discoverer had been on the same mid-tier, but now they're separated out - as is Forms and Reports, which means that if you want Portal, Discoverer and Reports, you've going to have to install four separate AS10g tiers. First of all a quick check of Enterprise Manager for the infrastructure and Portal tiers...

and then off with the install. As with the Infrastructure and Portal installs, the BI install went without any problems.

So now it was time to test out Discoverer Drake. The first thing you need to do with Drake (if you're going to use the OLAP Option) is to fire up Enterprise Manager, install the Discoverer Catalog, and authorise the schemas that will contain data that Discoverer will analyze.

Then it's just a case of starting up Discoverer Plus, selecting the Discoverer Plus OLAP Option, logging in and then bringing up Discoverer Drake.

One point I noted was that, like earlier AS releases, Discoverer by default doesn't use SSO, so you have to log on twice using your Discoverer username rather than Discoverer just falling back to the standard SSO login page. Going into Discoverer Plus OLAP you notice the new look and feel (compared to the beta) but other than that it's pretty much as you'd expect.

The total size of the install was 2.38GB for the software, another 1.66GB for the infrastructure database (total of 4.04GB). The start menu has two entries for each of the tiers (a standard Oracle Home entry, and a tier control entry) with menu items for starting and stopping each tier instance

That's it for now, more news as I get to play around with the various bits more.