This is ZX81.org.uk

This is the official home page for my Oracle on Linux HOWTO.

The current version is 1.18 and was released on 19 July 2003. It’s been a long time — nearly a year — since the last release which may lead you to conclude that it’s a major update. You would be wrong! I’ve added some text about “how to ignore that this document is out of date” and a few clarifications. (This may sound lazy, but it’s not possible to keep it completely up to date.) This update is mainly for the Linux Documentation Project rather than people that come here.

v1.18, 19 July 2003

With this HOWTO, and a little luck, you will be able to get “Oracle 8i Enterprise Edition for Linux” installed, create a database and connect to it from a remote machine. The main focus of this guide is RedHat Linux 6.0 and Oracle 8.1.5, although it should work well for other recent distributions and more stable versions of Oracle.

## 1. Introduction

## 1.1. What’s in here?

Linux is well known for being difficult and, generally, user hostile. Being a bit of a Unix fan I’m not sure whether I agree with that or not.

Prerequisites

Oracle 9i is the result of merging almost their entire product line into two products. To say that 9i is the database is a little misleading, but this is what you need if you want to keep current with your Oracle database.

There are a few things that you need to be aware of before embarking on the installation of Oracle 9i. First are it’s hardware requirements. They’re huge, much more than 8i which itself was large.

I assure you: it’s not deliberate. I’d like to go on record and say that I do not plan to only go to obscure — some have even said dangerous — places. I just go where my interests lie.

I’ve been to a couple of Buddhist countries recently (Thailand and Sri Lanka), but they both practise the same kind of Buddhism — called Theravada. I originally thought that they were the less pure form, the Church of England to Tibet’s Catholicism. I went to Tibet to see the “real” Buddhism, however it turns out that, in some ways, the opposite is true (it’s a long story; leave comments!). Tibetan Buddhism (Mahayana) is actually a merger of the traditional Tibetan religion, B?n, with more normal Buddhism.

In all honesty, I’ve not managed to get Oracle working properly yet. When I upgraded my RedHat 7 machine to 8 it still worked, when I installed it from scratch it didn’t. This clearly shows that it’s possible to get Oracle 8i working, but I can’t say how!

For those that are interested, I found that it was easy to get the installer to complete, but I get the infamous “end of communication channel” error when trying to start an instance.

Introduction

It sounded like just the kind of book that I was looking for. I wanted a refresher on C since I’d not used it for a while, and some pointers on ‘advanced techniques.’ The blurb on the back looked about right and the fact that O’Reilly published it clinched the sale.

“Practical C Programming” not only plans to teach you C, but also about style, debugging and the software life-cycle.

Introduction

The first point to note is that this book is published by O’Reilly. The second point would be that Steven Feuerstein is generally regarded to be one of the worlds leading PL/SQL experts.

Those two point, on their own, were enough to clinch the purchase just over eighteen months ago.

Content

The book is, to say the least, comprehensive. When I first started to use PL/SQL I would never have guessed that there was enough there to write a thousand page book, but there is.

You tend to find two things relating to programming languages on the Internet. The first is a long list of all the languages, often with links to a representative web site. The second category are the “representative” web sites, detailed descriptions of a particular language.

I hope to make this part of ZX81.org.uk to be the middle-ground. I won’t cover every language ever designed and nor will I cover them in vast amounts of detail. Instead I’ll look at each languages main features, advantages and flaws.

Credit where it’s due

I am unable to criticise a suite of products the size and complexity of Oracle on my own. There are a number of people that need to me mentioned. Remind me if I missed you out!

People

Thanks to Anna Brabants who nearly created the term ‘Oracle Comedy Errors’ and certainly did an almost continuous stream of abuse (not all of it at Oracle).

And thanks to the rest of the project team, who invariable love Oracle products as much as I do.

I have recently installed Oracle 8i R3 (8.1.7) on my Celeron 466 machine. I found the installation to be very straight-forward compared with both 8.1.5 and the experiences of many people.

My machine is well below the specification that would be required to do real work on, especially if you have a number of developers. It does work, albeit rather slowly. Creating my initial database, for example, took around eight hours.