Experience the Possibilities with Oracle 10g Express Edition

There are plenty of companies that produce large, expensive database programs with lots of features. But if you're a small company, you don't need to spend a lot of money to get a database that suits your needs; in fact, you may not need to spend any money at all. This article introduces you to Oracle 10g XE, a free database with a friendly user interface.

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By: Jayaram Krishnaswamy

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May 23, 2006

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Introduction

Why pay, if you can get it free? If you are not an enterprise, but a smallish outfit, a free database is all you need. You get free databases from all the big vendors, yes, that includes IBM, Oracle, Sybase and of course, Microsoft. Many of these databases include the keyword "express" in their names, which means do not wait, go get them and experience the freedom of free databases.

This article is about Oracle's latest free database, the Oracle 10g Express Edition, abbreviated as Oracle XE. I tried to install 10g once, the full version, and everything came to a standstill on my poor 800 MHz machine with 256 Mb memory. Oracle 10g XE is cool, and you may download it from the link I included above. The executable installation program is about 162 MB; most of the express editions are indeed small and can be installed on a Windows OS. Some of them even work on Windows XP Home.

Installation of Oracle 10g Express

You click on the executable and you will see the following welcome screen. The InstallShield wizard takes you through the steps which this tutorial also follows.

In this step you will choose a destination directory for the Express Edition files. The wizard will choose one for you, and should you disagree, you may choose one for yourself. The default is accepted for this tutorial.

This is an important step; take down notes as you type in your password. The password is for System and Sys. This is what you will be using for logging in the first time you use it. At this step, use Username: system and password: whatever password you choose.

Presto! Can it be any easier than this? You are ready to move on because the screen after this one says it's done.

This next screen shows the Oracle XE related items in the Services folder, which may be accessed by going through the trail Start -->Control Panel -->Administrative Tools -->Services.

This next screen shows the path to the executable on your local machine. This pops up when you right click OracleServiceXE in the Services screen.

Now the next screen shows how your folder structure looks after the installation. The list view on the right shows the expanded view of the folder oradata.