The Oracle Database, also known as Oracle RDBMS is a relational database management system, which is produced and marketed by Oracle Corporation. The Oracle Database Systems is one of the most popular database systems, competing with likes of MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server among others. Oracle is a very robust database solution.
Of course Oracle is a non-free software, and might not be well really liked by free software purists, and its corporate versions and support cost a bomb, but to be fair Oracle does offer a free Express Edition for its somewhat older 10g release, more popularly known as Oracle XE 10g. It’s a free download and is available for variety of platforms including various distros of Linux and Microsoft Windows.
In this tutorial, we will discuss on setting up and configuring Oracle XE 10g in Ubuntu. Here I’ve used a 32 bit version of Ubuntu 9.10 for this purpose, but these instructions will easily work for previous or future iterations of Ubuntu.
First of all we download Oracle 10g XE from Oracle website. I suggest to download from the Oracle’s Debian Repos directly, here. Select the Universal or the standard package for Oracle. Note the client is bundled with the Oracle Software itself, so no need to install it separately. Of course if you wish client alone for connecting to an Oracle software, you may proceed to install it as any Debian package.
Note you need enough RAM for Oracle in your system. If you have less than 1GB RAM, then you need to create more a gig of swap in the system by:
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swpfs bs=1M count=1000
sudo mkswap /swpfs
sudo swapon /swpfs
Also you have to download the libaio package, which is necessary for installation of Oracle. Note DEB packages may open directory in Firefox, so use “Save Link As…” in that case.
Note all these packages are 32bit packages, and there’s no 64 bit packages for any Oracle XE. However you can conveniently install the 32 bits packages in a 64 bit system as we will highlight further.
Download and save the packages in some convenient directory, say $HOME/Downloads, and then fire up the terminal and change to the directory containing the packages.
