This post is the first of a series of ten posts that will explore some of the Oracle Universal Installer (OUI), Network Assistant (NETCA), Database Creation Assistant (DBCA), Database Upgrade Assistant (DBUA), and many more syntaxes you can use to script or speed up Oracle Installations. The agenda should follow the one below:

1. Installation Of 10.2 And 11.1 Databases (this post!)
2. Patching 10.2 And 11.1 Databases
3. Cloning Software and Databases
4. Installing a 10.2 RAC Database
5. Add a Node to a 10.2 RAC database
6. Remove a Node from a 10.2 RAC database
7. Install a 11.1 RAC Database
8. Add a Node to a 11.1 RAC database
9. Remove a Node from a 11.1 RAC database
10. A ton of other stuff you should know

Actually, I may have to split the post #10 into ten more posts to cover all the other syntaxes you could use with Oracle Enterprise Manager, Application Server, or on Windows. Anyway, for now let’s focus on the very beginning: how to install 10.2 or 11.1 non-RAC database; how to apply the latest patch set; and how to create a instance database from a template.

Foreword

First, just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t make it true — even if it’s on the Pythian Blog. There will be a lot of syntaxes in those ten posts and even if they’ve been all tested, (1) the testing conditions are probably very different from your environment, and (2) the commands have been customized so that they appear generic. Be careful; it’s very likely that the syntaxes will be wrong for you. Test them yourself on a test environment and don’t execute them if you don’t understand what every part of them is supposed to do.

One of the reasons for these posts is that it’s kind of difficult to figure out by yourself how you should run one particular tool. The information is spread across the reference manuals, the response files, the online help, and sometimes Oracle Metalink or people that managed to make it work.

In addition, if the syntax looks similar for all the tools, they differ more than we can guess first. Let’s take some examples to illustrate that and to begin with the syntaxes:

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