Installing RdB
One thing I wanted to do for a long time is installing RdB – the only really VMS-based relational database. Once one of those Digitlal products that were too far ahead of their time, and lacked the markering it deserved, now still in active development at Oracle.
Installtion should be easy, but it turned out that I had a few things messed up slightly: since all clusterwide files are placed in a separate location and therefore are reeferenced by logicals, these should all be correct. As found by this installtion, one wasn’t: VMS$PASSWORD_HISTORY had a typo and referenced a non-existing device. By that, SET PASSWORD/GENERATE as used by the installation procedure didn’t work and so the installation aborted. The documentation warned that if the password should not be locked – but here, the whole account didn’t exist, but this mismatch wasn’t mentioned. Oracle’s Metalink RdB forum proved to be helpfiul, when the problem was solved, installation went flawless. The RdB monitor and processed are now started, taking very little resources.
A second program to be installed is SQLServer – the SQL frontend, allowing external access to the database by SQL*Net – like an ordinary Oracle database. No problem here either.
A third product I’d like to have installed that relies on RdB is the CDD – Common Data Dictionary, but installtion here fails because the distributed transaction manager isn’t running – because DECNet has not been configured – yet.
So some work to be done.
What goes on behind the doors of the (private) data center