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…

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

Spotted on a technicolor gateway.