Oracle 10G Express Edition – Easy installs on Linux at last!

Oracle have released Oracle 10G Express Edition.
I have been using Oracle on Linux for years and it has consistently been the most painful software install. The Oracle install instructions were always unusable. Werner Puschitz (http://puschitz.com) has become famous by providing usable instructions for the various Linux flavours.
So it came as a big surprise that 10G Express Edition was a downloadable rpm. Oracle was always picky about supporting Fedora Core. This version is however targeted at developers.
So, I tried to install it with rpm using 

rpm -ivh oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-0.1.i386.rpm

. On the first attempt it failed with a missing dependency “libaio”. That was fixed with 

yum install libaio

and then I tried again. A couple of minutes later and it prompted me for a web port and whether I wanted Oracle to start on machine startup. Then that was it! All done.
The installer did fail to create Gnome menu items as promised. A bit of trial and error and googling on my web port and I was able to bring up the admin screen on 

http://localhost:port/htmldb

.
All things considered it is a pretty smooth install and should do a lot to ease new developers into Oracle.
Going beyond the surface I tried to bring our application up on it. I created a new user. It took a bit of fiddling to figure out what the ORACLE_SID was. It turned out to be “XE”. Trying our app out, which uses Oracle Spatial features had problems however. Oracle Spatial (SDO) is not part of XE. XE is limited to 4GB databases. Oracle probably thought there was no point adding in spatial which can have very large file sizes. Our app however just stores spatial extents which are pretty small and searches those.
So will this help Oracle? Yes. Will it convince a lot of Java developers to use XE as an embedded database? Probably not. The world has moved on. It is competing with pure Java databases which have a zero install. For simple persistence, there are even simpler solutions, such as the persistent mode of DiskStores in ehcache. Will it convince Java developers to use XE rather than MySQL or PostGres? Maybe.
The 10G XE homepage is here.

By Greg Luck

As Terracotta’s CTO, Greg (@gregrluck) is entrusted with understanding market and technology forces and the business drivers that impact Terracotta’s product innovation and customer success. He helps shape company and technology strategy and designs many of the features in Terracotta’s products. Greg came to Terracotta on the acquisition of the popular caching project Ehcache which he founded in 2003. Prior to joining Terracotta, Greg served as Chief Architect at Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. He also served as a lead consultant for ThoughtWorks on accounts in the United States and Australia, was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts and spent seven years as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG’s small business and insolvency divisions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and contributor of articles to the technical press.