So the first phase of my testing I installed Oracle Express Edition on Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Edition 4, and Oracle Unbreakable Linux 4 Update 4. The installation required two sets of binaries, one for Windows and one for Linux. There were the Express Edition binaries and the SQL Developer binaries. The size of the binaries looked like…
Linux – Express Edition – 215Mbytes
– SQL Developer – 39Mbytes
– JDK for Linux 57Mbytes
– install footprint 200M app, 450M database – 650M
– memory footprint – 512Mbytes
Windows – Express Edition – 162Mbytes
– SQL Developer – 67Mbytes
– install footprint – 1.1G (includes JDK as part of package)
– memory footprint – 512Mbytes
The installation on Windows was trivial. Execute the database installation executable and select the defaults. The only data that needed to be entered was the password for the system account. The installation on Linux was a little more difficult. The Linux installation did not have a large enough swap footprint so I had to double the swap area to properly perform the installation. The installation was a simple rpm folled by a custom script generated by the installation. To install the software on Linux I had to perform the following steps
1) verify swap space
swapon -s
On RHEL4 I had to add swap space which involved adding another disk through vmware which required halting the operating system and adding a vmware SCSI disk. Once I did this I had to use fdisk to define a primary partition and label it as Linux Swap. Once I did this I had to use the mkswap command to initialize the device and then add it to swap using the swapon command.
On Unbreakable Linux, this was not an issue because the swap space was defined at 2G.
2) verify that the network was up and running with ifconfig -a
On Unbreakable Linux the network was bound to a MAC address that was different than the hardware that I was running on. I had to uncheck this and make sure that I could get a DHCP address
3) mount the software images from the localhost
On RHEL4 and Unbreakable Linux I had to define the vmware host in the /etc/hosts file and share the external USB disk from the vmware host as well. Once I did this I was able to mount the disk using
mkdir /mnt/e
mount -t smbfs //vmware-host/e /mnt/e
4) install the database software
cd /mnt/e/products/database/Express Edition
rpm -i oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-1.0.i386.rpm
/etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure
– define HTTP port
– define database listener port
– define password for SYS and SYSTEM
– opt to start the database on boot which also starts the database now.
5) install the SQL Developer software
cd /mnt/e/products/sqldeveloper
rpm -i sqldeveloper-1.1.23.61-1.noarch.rpm
On RLEH4 I had to download a JDK and the Firefox browser to get SQL Developer working. I could have done these when I installed RHEL4 but the image provided to me did not contain these packages. Installation of these packages were simple but did require an additional step on this platform.
To install the software on Windows I just executed the OracleXE.exe and unzipped the sqldeveloper-2364.zip file. The OracleXE binary asked for an installation directory location and password for the system account. Once these were finished, the database was installed, configured, and running. When I started the SQL Developer I had to define a connection to the localhost and login using the ports and password provided when I installed the database.
Once the software was installed, it looked the same independant of the operating system configuration. The SQL Developer and Database web management interfaces function and look the same on all operating system levels.
The reason I started with the Express Edition and SQL Developer is that these are the basis for most software development and testing. These platforms in conjunction with Oracle Unbreakable Linux can be obtained at zero cost for a developer. Many companies use this model for development or use Windows XP as the basis because that is the operating system that comes with new desktops or laptops.
next up…. installing standard edition on the same platfoms.