Installing Oracle XE (Express Edition) on Server

I'll start with a recommendation :

Use a dedicated server as your development database, or at least, don't use it on your development machine.
It'll slow down your development machine and development process.
The XE is simple to install, but it's not MySQL. It is a slightly heavier database.


I know most of you are used to a database installed on your machine (Like most of MySQL users do), but that's not a way to work with Oracle database.
Even not with the smallest one.

You can easily install one Oracle instance on a server machine, and even develop lots of Web 2.0 applications using this one instance, or give each one of the developers a saparate "Database" to work with, like theyr'e used to.

I, personally, recommend one development database for all the developers together, for most cases.
It is easier and safer to manage one database account.
Plus, you'll have bigger amounts of data during the development process, so you can tune your application better and earlier.



How do I install oracle XE?

OK, so we don't have a lot of choices here, as the XE can be installed on linux or Windows machine.

Now, this XE installation was a little bit of surprise for me when I first saw it.

Anyone who is familiar with Oracle database products knows installing these products costs you a lot of time and nerves.

You read installation documents, compile dependencies, and ALWAYS find out that for some weird reason you can't make it run correctly.

Don't worry, almost anything that happened to you, happened to someone else too.
Remember there is an Oracle database in almost any big organization, and trust me ,it was installed successfully in almost any configuration you would could imagine.

So, there is good support and full documentation, but the ease of installation cannot be compared with the small databases that rule the web 2.0 world (MySQL, PostgreSQL), being pre-installed, or easy to install on almost any platform.


And here comes Oracle with some news, and makes the XE, one easy to install application. At last...


LINUX :

As this product is targeting the apt-get generation of developers, this is how you install oracle on debian distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and so on).

# apt-get install oracle-xe

Or, if you're going to use language that is not western European (Chinese, hebrew etc.) in your data:

# apt-get install oracle-xe-universal

And that's it.

If you are going to use only English, or Western European languages that does not require Unicode, I recommend that you download the first one (the xe-universal) , because in the universalversion all character columns (CHAR, VARCHAR2, CLOB etc.) take double space on the disks (2 bytes for each character instead of 1).


WINDOWS :

As for windows users, it's a bit less convenient. But, we're used to it, aren't we?

First, go to
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/xe/htdocs/102xewinsoft.html
with your favorite browser.

Download the installer (exe file). (Remeber to download the universal version if you intend to be international).

Double-click on it.

Click Next, Next, Next etc. and press some kind of an "I agree" disclaimer (Linux users seem to avoid this stupid process), and you're done.


Hey, that was almost too simple... is it really Oracle?
Yes it is. And it is one powerful database...

And now you have your own instance of oracle on your machine.

I hope for you it is a dedicated machine.

I'll say it again, because I know it's tempting, as the installation is so simple : it'll slow down any development machine you'll work with, specially if it's a windows machine.

That's it for today.

Next post :
Finally, getting to work : Connecting rails to oracle, and handling some very annoying problems.