I realised a few days ago that the disk of my Oracle Linux VM only had a few GB left and that I was going to need more space to store additional data. I decided therefore to add a new disk to the VM (click the link to see how I did it) and to move the Oracle database files to the new disk. So let’s see how I did it in this new tutorial.
First I executed the “select name from v$datafile;” command to identify the names and locations of the database files. As you can see in the next screenshot, most of the files were located in the “/opt/oracle/oradata/ORCLCDB/” directory but some of them were in the “/opt/oracle/product/19c/dbhome_1/dbs/” directory.
The idea was to move these datafiles to the new virtual disk. I needed first to shutdown the oracle instance in order to move the files. I used the “shutdown immediate” command to close and dismount the database.
For simplicity, I wanted to have all the datafiles in the same location, so I moved the two files that were initially located in the “/opt/oracle/product/19c/dbhome_1/dbs/” directory to the “/opt/oracle/oradata/ORCLCDB/” directory using the “mv” shell command.
All the datafiles were now located in the “/opt/oracle/oradata/ORCLCDB/” directory. Therefore I used the “rsync -a /opt/oracle/oradata/ /mnt/data/oradata/” shell command to copy the “/opt/oracle/oradata/” directory onto the new disk mounted as “/mnt/data/“.
I decided to rename the original “/opt/oracle/oradata” directory to “/opt/oracle/oradata.old” in order to have a temporary backup of the database files in case something went wrong.
I created a new symbolic link from the “/mnt/data/oradata” directory to “/opt/oracle/oradata” using the “ln -s /mnt/data/oradata /opt/oracle/oradata” shell command. It allowed to keep the original filenames for most of the oracle database datafiles. I checked the result with the “ls -l /opt/oracle” shell command.
I went back to the sqlplus command line interface and restarted the oracle instance using the “startup mount” command.
I renamed the two files that were originally located in the “/opt/oracle/product/19c/dbhome_1/dbs/” folder in order to reflect their new location using the “alter database rename file” sqlplus command.
And finally I opened the database using the “alter database open” sqlplus command.
I decided to test if everything was ok by executing a SELECT statement for one of the tables created during the configuration of OAS (stored in the BI_biplatform.dbf datafile):
And everything went smoothly. I could now remove the “/opt/oracle/oradata.old” backup directory using the “rm -rf /opt/oracle/oradata.old/” shell command.
After that, I checked how much space was available on the virtual disks using the “df -m” shell command.
The original disk now had a bit less than 8 GB available while the new disk had more than 31 GB available. Great, I now had plenty of space for storing my BI data!
Disclaimer
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