I’ve been assigned the task of making our Java web application work with Oracle Database. I am not sure where to start. I was hoping for an experience similar to working with MySQL or PostgreSQL, but no such luck.
The answer to this question will be list of steps for installing and deploying an Oracle Database for development use, basic operations such as starting and stoping, creating and dropping schemas, and perhaps even JDBC connection parameters.
A little bit of background about my project (although ideally the answer to this question will be as general purpose as possible and not be tied to the specifics of my environment):
- Java (and Scala) web apps deployed in Tomcat
- Hibernate (currently connected to PostgreSQL and MySQL)
- Developer workstations run OS X; production deployments are to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Firstly, don’t think about Oracle on OS X. You’ll need Linux (or Windows), maybe on a virtual machine/
Then decide whether you’ll be using Oracle 10g or 11g. 10g has a free Express Edition which is relatively easy to install on Linux or Windows. However, if you want 11g or bug fixes to 10g or some of the extra options (compression, partitioning…) you’ll need a fully licenced version of Oracle. Depends on your load, but you can have one physical machine which is licenced for Oracle, with multiple VMs (one for each developer).
XE has a single database instance that the installer will configure to start up when you start the machine. If you are just using the VM for the database, having the database startup and shutdown with the machine is the easiest way to go.