Rich,Please note that the comments in favor of DBCA did not extol the virtues of the GUI nature of the tool in any way, but rather advocated two different scripting capabilities for automation. I haven't seen anyone praise GUI interfaces for repetitive tasks.
Speaking for myself, I use DBCA "-silent" or at least the generated scripts for automation of the other tasks in creating a database (besides the CREATE DATABASE command) such as "orapwd" or "oradim", as appropriate to the OS, because I see no reason to re-learn the hard way what Oracle has already developed for new releases. I don't always agree with what has been developed, but that is what editors are for. Also, as you noted, junior DBAs are less likely to encounter problems with a scripted solution, while learning the most from studying the scripts themselves.
ASM has a lot of advantages over file-systems, certainly more advantages than disadvantages. OMF has a lot of advantages over obsessing about file naming. And DBCA (as well as the OUI) support scripting for automation, which beats trying to maintain one's own library of "crdb_<db-version>.sh" scripts, as I've done for so long.
Old dogs can learn new tricks, but only if they realize the old tricks don't necessarily improve with age.
Thanks! -Tim On 3/25/2014 8:14 AM, Rich Jesse wrote:
We use dbca to create the database but also have it generate the scripts so that if something happens that requires the database to be rebuilt we can go back to the generated scripts and not miss anything.It seems I'm the only stick in the mud who doesn't like using DBCA. I just gave it another shot on 11.2.0.3 to make sure it's still a terrible GUI. If one accepts the defaults for datafiles it might be OK, but I have yet to be able to modify the default datafiles without GUI corruption. Maybe if I type slow and don't make mistakes, but that's hardly practical. Every new release, I do use it to see what new items it adds to the script generation, but that's it. I don't like tools that make it easy for a Jr. DBA to screw up, as the default template includes licensed options (which are also a major pain to remove post-install, from experience). And with the GUI issues, I just don't trust it to properly create my databases. No OMF. No ASM. No DBCA. They are (potentially) answers to problems I don't have, and include or have included major bugs that I don't need. As a solo DBA, there is just no ROI that anyone's been able to prove for me to use them. Sigh. I don't get to attend the Cool Tool Party...again. APEX! I love APEX! Does that count? :) Rich -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
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