Oracle problems

I started out working as a Microsoft SQL Server DBA (database administrator) about six and a half years ago, and even though I'm a manager now, I still do a good bit of work with the company database servers. We have, oh 9-10 SQL Servers, a MySQL server and a couple of Oracle servers (one in production, one development). The production Oracle server is the back-end for our web portal. We're running Oracle Database 8i on the server, which is no longer being supported by Oracle, so I have been working on a project to upgrade this system to Oracle Database 10gR2, which is the current version.

Here's where the problem comes in. The web portal that uses Oracle is no cash cow, and given the fact that no other system in our company runs on Oracle, there's no money available for training. On top of that is the fact that the system works perfectly fine with Oracle 8i, thank you very much, so I've been trying to get this project underway for over a year. Something else always takes precedence. After doing some testing a few months back, we determined that upgrading to 10gR2 wouldn't break our site, so I've been trying to squeeze in some time to upgrade the development server (as a test) and then the production server. Well, this week I finally had a few hours to work through it. Unfortunately, it didn't quite go as planned.

After downloading the latest patches, I ran through the 10gR2 install, but once I got it in place, I realized that the new system would have to have a different database name, which was okay for the dev environment but wouldn't be for production. So I uninstalled the software. Next I tried to run the install and do the upgrade wizard as part of the installation. The upgrade wizard apparently couldn't communicate with the 8i database, even though I could still connect to it with the 8i tools, so I cancelled the 10gR2 installation and deleted all the services and related files from the initial install. I stopped all the 8i services and ran the installation and upgrade again, and after a couple of hours, the upgrade had completed successfully. Great! So then I went ahead and tried to run the latest patchset installation over the upgraded database. For some reason the installation would not replace a particular .dll file. I looked on the Oracle support site and couldn't find any reference to this error, so I cancelled the installation. Bad mistake.

So now the database isn't responding and the services won't start. I ran the patchset installation again, and still got the .dll error, but I ignored it and progressed through the install. Still the services wouldn't start. So I deleted the Oracle 8i folder and rebooted the computer. Then I installed the patchset again and it installed successfully, so I thought, "Now it's going to work!" I rebooted the system, and was able to start the services and mount the database, but it wouldn't open. When I dug into the logs, I realized that the database was looking for some of the custom database files that no longer existed, having been conveniently deleted by yours truly when I dropped the Oracle 8i folder. Now I had an upgraded system that was totally broken with no way to recover. So then I uninstalled all the Oracle software, deleted the files and services and reinstalled Oracle 8i and the patches to bring it up to our current version. So I'm almost ready to start all over again, after I import all of our data from production. Keep in mind that this has taken me a week, and I'm not any closer to getting the upgrade completed than when I started. It's a good thing I don't need Oracle training.