Reasons to Be Cheerful - part 1 - Repository Creation Utility

30 Sep 2009 by Simon Haslam (in General)

Last month one of my jobs was what I'd call an 'enterprise install' of OAS 10gR2 for a customer: 4 servers, all the products (OHS, Web Cache, Portal, Forms, Reports, Disco, SSO, OID), internet-facing SSL, and a separate metadata repository in the database tier. Meanwhile, in my 'spare' time, I have been building several Fusion Middleware 11g test environments. This has given me an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast the process between these major versions.

The first notable feature of 11g is the new Repository Creation Utility (RCU), the replacement for the old Metadata Repository Creation Assistant (MRCA, aka RepCA). MRCA was a vital tool for setting up a 'proper' tiered OAS installation, but was nevertheless a large, monolithic beast and prone to errors (especially if you had an existing, upgraded database). I'm very pleased that RCU appears to be a slick, well-engineered successor.

For those who haven't used RCU yet, here are some screenshots - I'll just show the significant ones as the others are self-explanatory.

RCU still has MRCA's extensive pre-requisite checks but expanded in scope. For example, it now checks you're on database version 10.2.0.4 or 11.1.0.7; otherwise it gives a warning (which you should obviously heed for production/test environments). However I've used it successfully for SOA on XE (10.2.0.1.0) and am just building an environment on database 11g R2 (11.2.0.1.0) too - so far so good.

The key RCU screen is the one for component selection:

With RCU you now have a fine-grained selection level - it's no longer an 'all or nothing' affair. You'll also see that you can automatically add a prefix to all the schema's tables, therefore allowing multiple repositories to co-exist in the same database. For these examples I'm only creating the schemas for Oracle Internet Directory, which is simple and not an unusual requirement.

What is less obvious from the screen is that you can re-run RCU and add schemas for additional components later (though you can't delete them at the moment using this tool).

Following this we have the opportunity to set passwords at a component, or sub-component ('auxiliary') level:

Obviously if you are installing more components, e.g. SOA, there will be more schemas in this list.

Next we get a tablespace screen - similar to MRCA except thankfully it looks as though there has been some tablespace rationalisation with 11g:

And that's about it!

Note: if you need to install the 10g SSO server into an OFM 11g environment you need a special version of the SSO Metadata Repository Creation Assistant (10.1.4.3.0) - available from the OFM 11g download page - which just installs the SSO schemas.

In summary, this is what I like about the new RCU tool:

• having a choice of components rather than having to create lots of schemas you won't use,
  
• you can add additional components later,
• your database doesn't need options installed that your component(s) don't require (e.g. UltraSearch),
  
• you can prefix your schema with something meaningful, and have several repositories in one database.

So far I haven't found anything in 11g's RCU that isn't better than 10g's MRCA... definitely a reason to be cheerful!