Written by: ilmarkerm

Category: Blog entry

Published: January 17, 2021

SystemD is standard today in the Linux world, and it is very powerful and good, I really like it.

Wouldn’t it be nice to manage Oracle database components also with SystemD? Not just simple starting and stopping, but also making sure it keeps running and restarts it automatically if needed.

I also want to manage listener separately from the database instances, since one listener can service multiple database instances and also keeping automation and automated out-of-place patching in mind – listener does not need to run from the same home as database instance.

Realistic example: you need to wait for months until Oracle support creates you an essential merge patch for the database, but before that you can already run listener with the latest Release Update Revision, that fixes the latest security bugs.

Here is the code:

oracle-listener.service is the SystemD unit file. I have intended it to be pushed out centrally from Ansible, so the content there is generated automatically, for example the Oracle Home path, the the PID file location.

get_listener_pid.sh the purpose of this script is to return the listener process PID (tnslsnr) to SystemD, so it could keep an eye on it, and restart if it happens to die. Rather long script for such a simple task, but we are dealing with Oracle here, and instead of just returning a simple process PID, “lsnrctl show pid” has a lot on unnecessary clutter in the output.