Installing Oracle Database XE on the Windows Platform

Performing the Installation

Double-click the file OracleXE.exe, and the Oracle Install Wizard for Oracle Database XE starts. You will see the window shown in Figure 27-1.

Click the Next button, and you will see the License Agreement page for Oracle Database XE shown in Figure 27-2. Review the license agreement and click the I Accept… radio button, then click the Next button. Oracle Database XE is free, if you weren’t aware of this yet.

Figure 27-1.  The Oracle Database XE Install Wizard

Figure 27-2.  The Oracle Database XE License Agreement window

In Figure 27-3, select the folder where you want to install Oracle Database XE. Be sure to select a folder on a disk drive with at least 1.6GB of available disk space. In this example, you put the installation files and the starter database in the folderD:\OracleXE. By default, the system executable and configuration files reside in theappsubdirectory, and user data files are stored in theoradatasubdirectory underD:\OracleXE; however, you can change the location of the data files later if you have a faster disk drive, for example.

Figure 27-3.  Specifying the Oracle Database XE destination location

After you click the Next button, you enter and confirm the password for theSYSandSYSTEMaccounts shown in Figure 27-4. You can create different passwords for these accounts later using the administrative Web page we introduce later in the “Creating User Accounts” section. Click the Next button after you confirm the password.

Figure 27-4. The Oracle Database XE Specify Database Passwords window

In the installation settings window shown in Figure 27-5, you can review the options you specify, including the default values for the Oracle database listener, Oracle Services for Microsoft Transaction Server, and the Oracle administrative HTTP listener port.

Figure 27-5.  The Oracle Database XE installation settings window

Note  You may wonder why the default HTTP listener port is 8080 and not the default HTTP port 80. This is because the default installation of Apache HTTP Server uses port 80; any content you serve for your users will most likely be managed by Apache and your PHP applications using port 80. Since the Oracle Database XE administrative interface is also an HTTP service, it must use a different port number. As a result, you have two Web servers running on your workstation at the same time. This is not a problem since they are listening on different port numbers.

After you click the Install button, the installer copies the files to the destination directory and creates the database. When the installation process is complete, you see the window shown in Figure 27-6.

Figure 27-6.  Oracle Database XE installation is complete.

By default, the Launch the Database Homepage checkbox is selected. After you click the Finish button, the installer automatically starts the Oracle Database XE administrative interface you saw in Chapter 25.