I’m a big oracle fan, which might seem a bit strange in a world dominated with the LAMP stack and its exclusive use of MySQL or, at a push, Postgresql. That’s not the entire world obviously, that’s my world and it is definitely MySQL-orientated. In the world of work however, I’ve had extensive exposure to Oracle and think its great, so I was very excited when I saw the free mini-Oracle be released earlier this year. These are my first experiences of working with it.

Installing Oracle XE on Windows.

OK so I’m not actually going to use this on windows really but when I tried to install this on Linux I had a major problem right at the outset. There is a choice of either a .rpm or a .deb file to install from and since I had sent my sysadmin to the supermarket, I had no idea which I needed! The windows installer promised to be point-and-click and since I’m actually running Windows on one machine at the moment (grr wireless drivers grr) I was tempted by the idiot-proof windows installer so I grabbed that.

Well, idiot-proof was a gross understatement! I ran the installer, it asked me where I’d like the files put and then to input a root password, and the next thing I know its all done and inviting me to log in. I’ve installed Oracle many times on Windows and believe me, its not supposed tobe this easy. Anyway it works, I’ve been chattering to it on command line and everything is cool. The next step is to get it installed under Linux – it turns out that our Ubuntu server would like the .deb file best, so I’ll try that out and keep updating here.