Today we were installing a new Oracle server on IBM Pseries running AIX 7.2.
The installation was done with the, at this moment, newest release of Oracle, being 19.9
The installation of the base release 19.3 and the release update went successful.
Creating a database however using dbca got stuck after entering the database file location in Step 5.
The trace.log file of dbca only showed:
INFO: Nov 03, 2020 3:29:54 PM oracle.install.commons.util.StatusControl showMessage
INFO: Validating writability of the storage location provided
Since this was a new server and we already had installed multiple servers with this Oracle release but on Redhat Enterprise Linux 7, we suspected the AIX server to be the cause of this problem.
UNIX administrators were involved and together we started searching for the cause.
The file location was writable, the process state using "truss" showed a continues loop of checks, with certain repeating functions like "ptx_get_cpuinfo", "ptx_get_wparsysinfo" and "ptx_get_wparsysstats" etc..etc..
Oracle Support gave some result on these functions, but these results where linked to 'srvctl' and not 'dbca'. After entering a more detailed search description:
"dbca hang database files location"
"dbca hang database files location"
the first result was Doc ID 2706037.1 with the title:
Database creation via DBCA hangs when the database files location does not include {DB_UNIQUE_NAME}
Database creation via DBCA hangs when the database files location does not include {DB_UNIQUE_NAME}
It turns out that according to this Doc that DBCA as of release 19.3 requires a DB_UNIQUE_NAME in the file location, whenever you deviate from the given default.
Again, on Linux we have never seen this issue, and all our systems have the same non-oracle-default setup.
After appending our default location, with this DB_UNIQUE_NAME, dbca continued as expected.
Conclusion: On AIX it seems that DBCA can't work with a non-default database location, if it does not contain the DB_UNIQUE_NAME.
It does however also not generate an error message to tell you about this.
It simply gets stuck.
However AIX is a very stable and reliable operating system, I tend to move all databases to Linux, since it is more reliable and thrustfull.
Again, on Linux we have never seen this issue, and all our systems have the same non-oracle-default setup.
After appending our default location, with this DB_UNIQUE_NAME, dbca continued as expected.
Conclusion: On AIX it seems that DBCA can't work with a non-default database location, if it does not contain the DB_UNIQUE_NAME.
It does however also not generate an error message to tell you about this.
It simply gets stuck.
However AIX is a very stable and reliable operating system, I tend to move all databases to Linux, since it is more reliable and thrustfull.
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