I like Oracle database servers and I’m using their software for many years. So I decided to try their fresh meat 10g Express Edition.

Note: Even if I like Oracle’s concept, I will not tell you that the empty string is null (” IS NULL returns true in Oracle database) and I completely disagree with this part of Oracle’s concept. What I say is that the empty string is the string of zero length, but NULL is much closer to nothing than to the empty string.

The installation procedure itself is unbelievably easy, especially when compared to the full version, but it’s strongly recommended to read the minimum system requirements documentation before downloading and installing Oracle 10g Express Edition on Fedora Code 4. Otherwise you will experience problems or the database will run very very slow.

One of the common problems is insufficient swap space:

[root@server /]# rpm -ivh /opt/oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-0.1.i386.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
expr: syntax error
/var/tmp/rpm-tmp.62833: line 31: [: -lt: unary operator expected
This system does not meet the minimum requirements for swap space.
Based on the amount of physical memory available on the system,
Oracle Database 10g Express Edition requires 1134.0 MB of swap space.
This system has 798 MB of swap space.
Configure more swap space on the system and retry the installation.
error: %pre(oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-0.1.i386) scriptlet failed, exit status 1
error:   install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping oracle-xe-10.2.0.1-0.1

What now? Let’s use a little dirty trick! Create a swapfile on your ext3 (or whatever you have) partition.

[root@server /opt]# dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=8192 count=102400
[root@server /opt]# mkswap swapfile

Note: You should use dd carefully, or you can fill all you disk space. My example creates 800 MB of swapfile.

Then add it to the fstab.

[root@server /opt]# echo "/opt/swapfile swap swap defaults 1 2" >>/etc/fstab

And mount it.

[root@server /opt]# swapon /opt/swapfile

Now you can install Oracle 10g XE using rpm and enjoy! You are of course free to destroy the swapfile after successful installation (if you have more than 512 MB of free RAM, you don’t need to worry).

[root@server /opt]# swapoff /opt/swapfile
[root@server /opt]# rm swapfile

Note: The default database needs 300 MB of your memory after startup. And it also eats 1,2 GB in /usr/lib/oracle. At least, you should create a separate partition for the datafiles using ext2 or something less journaling than ext3. Oracle has it’s own filesystem in the datafiles, so basically it’s not necessary to have an overhead on ext3.

This fast workaround should also work for SUSE Linux 10.0 and probably for other binary compatible distributions. But it’s generally not recommended to do this on production servers!

Warning: If you decide to uninstall, note that it removes all data files.