… has just begun and is turning out to be quite an awesome month…

Through all those years being a DBA, I never really managed to get on the Oracle train as I wanted to. Hours and hours of training went by (which told me countless things I would fail to apply on real use scenarios), several months of operation and support, an infinite amount of time wasted in front of ISQL sessions with Korn Shell (so 19th century) bindings. A nightmare. Third party management apps made it suck a little less (out of which SQL Tools, free software, is REALLY a find), but from the management point of view, even Microsoft SQL Server got it better.

I never liked Oracle. Their website. Their logic. The tnsnames bluntness. Their stupid (and yet deterministic) error messages. Their (I’m lacking negative adjectives here, help) range of products. Their attitude. A little piece of me died when Sun and MySQL got into the Oracle bucket. Sigh. I respect the enterprise database product. I do. It’s probably (eh) quite powerful, but it’s too fucking much.

It’s frigging 2012 and I have to deal with people saying Oracle is better than MySQL for whatever they’re building while a single MySQL by my side peacefully deals with several requests per second on a 30 Gb database and tables with hundred million records. Eh. Whatever.

</rant>

So I’m stuck with these guys saying I have to install Oracle Database Express Edition somewhere.
After getting through a considerably bad registration form (which I cheerfully filled with fake data) to download the .rpm file (“Linux”, they say. Either that or a Windows .exe) and end up failing to install it seamlessly on the first two systems I tried. The first Ubuntu Server virtual machine failed to satisfy the dependencies (oh, the joy of building packages for multiple distributions), then it had too little swap memory (and that’s it: too little, it wouldn’t help by saying “hey, you need 10G of swap). Then I tried it on CentOS. Installed fine without any complains about dependencies or swap space.

For a moment there, I thought I would be having a field trip to DBA land again. Then I got a pretty clear (not) “Database Configuration failed. Look into /u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/xe/config/log for details” error message. The given directory, carefully perused, showed a bazillion entries saying “ORACLE not available”. No shit, Sherlock?

It turns out that the blocking issue was just me not having an entry on /etc/hosts with the same hostname as the one on /etc/sysconfig/network. That simple. I lost an hour looking at log files when a simple Google search could point me to the right place.

Oracle can be a quite powerful tool, I have to admit. I’m glad I no longer have to use it on a daily basis now. But it was about time they got the installation procedures a little clearer, no?

I know. It’s “old”. But this is not:

When it comes to security, you can never be too careful…

Too good not to share…

but then again, the spanish version doesn’t get any better…

Spotted on a technicolor gateway.