Moving an Existing Oracle 11g Database to a New Server

Sometimes you have a database installed on external storage and you need to move it to a new server. If your Oracle binaries are installed locally then you can't just install a new set of binaries, mount the volumes containing the database files and start the database. This is because Oracle creates directory structures and files under the Oracle binary directories. This article is meant to help you make these changes to your binary installation so it will recognize the new database. It is assumed that the operating systems of the source and target servers are the same and that the version of Oracle on both servers is the same also.

Create Users and Groups
Create any Oracle users and groups on the new server and make sure that the user IDs and group IDs are the same as they are on the source server. You can verify this on UNIX by checking the /etc/passwd file for user IDs and /etc/group for group IDs.

Install Oracle Binaries
The first step is to install the Oracle binaries as normal. Take note of the location of $ORACLE_BASE and $ORACLE_HOME directories and the $ORACLE_SID and substitute them where needed below.



Create Tnsnames and Listener Files
You can copy the existing tnsnames.ora and listener.ora files from the source server's $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin directory to the same directory on the target server and then edit the files to replace the source server's IP Address/Host Name with the target server's IP Address/Host Name.

Create Required Directories

Oracle changes the case of your $ORACLE_SID sometimes when it creates directories. If your $ORACLE_SID is in upper case it will sometimes change it to lower case. For the purposes of these examples I will denote that with $LC_ORACLE_SID. For example, if your $ORACLE_SID is MYDB then $LC_ORACLE_SID is mydb.

mkdir -p $ORACLE_BASE/diag/rdbms/$LC_ORACLE_SID/$ORACLE_SID
mkdir -p $ORACLE_BASE/diag/rdbms/$LC_ORACLE_SID/$ORACLE_SID/lck
mkdir -p $ORACLE_BASE/diag/rdbms/$LC_ORACLE_SID/$ORACLE_SID/adump
mkdir -p $ORACLE_BASE/diag/rdbms/$LC_ORACLE_SID/$ORACLE_SID/cdump
mkdir -p $ORACLE_BASE/diag/rdbms/$LC_ORACLE_SID/$ORACLE_SID/stage
mkdir -p $ORACLE_BASE/diag/rdbms/$LC_ORACLE_SID/$ORACLE_SID/alert

Copy the Spfile to the New Server
You should have an spfile in the $ORACLE_HOME/dbs directory. The name is a combination of the words spfile + your $ORACLE_SID + the extension .ora. For example spfileMYDB.ora. Copy this to the same directory on your target server.

Move the Database Files
Make sure the source database is shut down completely and then move the data files to the new server. You can unmount volumes from one server and mount them to another server or just copy the files themselves, along with the same directory structure. Make sure that all files, including all data files, online redo logs, archived redo logs and flash recovery files are moved or mounted to the new server with the same directory structures and permissions that they had on the source server.

At this point you can start your listener and then your database as you would normally.