Oracle 10g Win32 Installation

I thought its worth testing some Oracle xdb Features. So i downloaded Oracle 10g ( Version 10.1.0.2 ) and tried to install. i tried, it was annoying as it left my pc behind in a oracle-unusable state. The story goes like this:

install notes says that no other oracle home or installation is allowed. if an ORACLE_HOME is present, installer wont work. I first tried without deinstalling some oracle products but as the note said, the installer does not appear after starting it. so i deinstalled oracle 9i client software, further i deleted all ORACLE entries in the registry.

But the installer still does not work. After some searching i found install.exe for the 10g universal installer, a direct invocation was successful. (install guide is wrong about this). But after some steps some errors occurred, first it was possible to go on with installation ( unable to install OCR ), but then an installation or starting of a CSS service failed. so i aborted the installation. Oracle seems to be not able to release a working installation for the public. this is very daunting.

But to mention some positive words, oracle's instant client (only core dll's für client access) seems to work. To connect using TOAD, you have to decompress those instant client files, and supply PATH with this new location. Using regedit, you have to set TNS_ADMIN ( software => ORACLE ) to point to your tnsnames.ora.

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Info: an installation on another PC shows that error "unable to install OCR" is still present, good luck the error is skippable. A little bit later, a CSS-Service signals an error. oracle universal installer allows to ignore it. Installation goes on after this and leads to an working instance. i used a slow Pentium3 system @ 256 MB ram, but this is too slow. you have to be very patient during installation.