<p>I was wondering if there was a way to tell if an instance of Oracle on a system has a database installed or not?</p>

<p>This is for an installation script, and I need to verify that there is an actual database in place before proceeding with the loading of my own tablespace onto that database. Has anyone tackled this problem before?</p>

<p>Cheers</p>

You could use
```
tnsping
```
to check whether the database listener is active, that would be a good indication. Other than that, why not just simply do a test connection? If it's part of an installer process, you could prompt the user to enter the appropriate connection credentials if you don't know what they'll be in advance.