What is Oracle XE? This is an Oracle database that can be used for a private purpose. It is quite handy to learn SQL language on it because it has more functions and options than MySQL or other free version databases. Also there is a simple option to do backups and restoring them without worrying about your SQL testing results.
Oracle XE database can be downloaded on this link. To download it you would need just to create an account on Oracle site. The account creation needs some personal information, but it is for free and you can receive free update information about Oracle products. The site offers you to download either Windows or Linux version of the XE database. The database itself is an open source version and as we did mentioned before it is available for free personal use. To learn and to try out our SQL examples this database could be a perfect choice and it can be easily integrated with the Oracle Sql Developer tool. In addition, this database has simple build-in scripts to start and shutdown it so the database doesn’t have to work all the time in the background and eat your computer resources.
To Windows users we say that installing this Oracle database has been made very simple. You will be walking through the installation wizard and you would only set the database administrator passwords. Creating users and giving permissions can be done using the web administration window. We suggest you to create a separate user with standard privileged to avoid making any harm to the Oracle XE database system and it would help you to get use to with the standard development process using a causal user.
The Oracle XE administration guide can be found under this link.
To start the Oracle XE database click on “Start Database” button. The starting process will open a blank window and now you are ready to open the SQLPlus command using link “Run SQL Command Line“.
Once you are done with the XE Oracle database then it would be wise to shut it down. This way you will save your computer performance and other processes would not become slower. Of course, when you need the database frequently then you don’t have to shutdown it at all.
Your XE database will be shutdown when the following message will appear. You can just close the windows and we are done.
Please note that additional options in the Oracle XE start menu are “Backup Database” and “Restore Database“. The tools are quite straight forward to use and we do hope you would never have to use the restore database, but doing backups are quite important when you have done loads of work with your XE database and you want to make sure you wouldn’t lose it.
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