It’s been a while since the last article and I just found myself being enthousiastic about a neat Oracle hands on again. So while it’s downloading I might as well tell you guys about it.

Last year I have been working with Oracle XE a lot, but some features are not available in the express edition (XE), so some queries might not run as expected or simply don’t run at all. Oracle has a VM ware image, which provides a really nice solution for this problem:

They have created a database application environment inside a Virtualbox VM image, with the following specifications:

• Oracle Linux 5
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition
• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Cache
• Oracle XML DB
• Oracle SQL Developer
• Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler
• Oracle Application Express
• Oracle JDeveloper
• Hands-On-Labs (accessed via the Toolbar Menu in Firefox)

So if you’re looking for a nimble way to quickly run a OraDB on your laptop, without the hassle of installing all these components, this might just be what you’re looking for.