Atlantic Linux Blog

Oracle Database 10g Express Edition on Debian testing

So Oracle released a trimmed down version of their database engine back in March. It’s called Oracle Database 10g Express Edition and is available from Oracle. The interesting thing about Express Edition (XE) is that it is free to develop, deploy, and distribute. It does come with some limitations – the maximum amount of data you can store with it is 4GB, it will only use 1GB of system RAM and won’t use more than one processor, but it is perfect for development and testing. It also features a very nice web-based administration and user interface.

I’ve been using Oracle as a developer and DBA since version 7.3.4 and while the standard Oracle tools (a command-line tool called sqlplus) are powerful – they are far from friendly (I wait with baited breath for a version with command-line history). XE’s web-based interface allows basic administration and user tasks to be carried out without having an Oracle reference to hand, which is nice.

Where possible, we tend to use Debian GNU/Linux for our testing and development. It’s free, reliable, portable and comes with excellent package management software. Furthermore, it is available in a a number of different flavours – stable, testing and unstable which allow you to choose a version of the operating system with the latest and greatest software, or a version with more stable but slightly older packages.

For development, we tend to use the testing distribution which keeps us close to the bleeding edge without exposing us to too many serious bugs and problems. When Oracle announced XE for both Windows and Linux – I was delighted to hear that not only were they releasing packages for RedHat and SuSe – the 2 commercial distributions, but they were also going to release packages for Debian.

I decided to reinstall our Debian testing system and try installing XE. I was pleasantly surprised at how straightforward the install went (I’ve previously installed versions of Oracle software on Debian systems, albeit with some hacking and gnashing of teeth – since they were intended to be installed primarily on RedHat or SuSE). To get XE up and running on Debian testing was as straightforward as follows,

1. Install Debian testing using the latest netinst image.
2. Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list on the installed system and add the following lines to the file:

deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian/ unstable main non-free
deb-src http://oss.oracle.com/debian/ unstable main

3. apt-get update
4. apt-get install oracle-xe-universal
5. /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure

… and your XE system is up and running and ready to be used. You can either use the traditional sqlplus or connect to the web interface at http://127.0.0.1:8080/apex. The package installs itself under /usr/lib/oracle/xe which isn’t FHS-compliant but apart from that, the Oracle debian packages seem to be pretty well-behaved.

If you have a Debian system lying around and are curious about Oracle, this is a great opportunity to take a look at the system at no cost.