Oracle nonsense

Was to install an Oracle DB on my Debian system the other day. Now, a big kudos to Oracle for providing Debian packages of their XE version. However, the non sense started once the thing was apt-get-ed.

It turned out that if you set the system user password to ‘admin’, you cannot log in! What kind of headless logic is that?!! And of course, there’s no way to re-set the admin password, so I had to re-install the DB to try a new password.

# apt-get --purge delete oracle-xe
# apt-get install oracle-xe

So, after setting the following in my .bashrc, I can enjoy (developer version of) Oracle 10.2.0.1.0 with less installation fuss than normal

######################################################################
# Oracle
######################################################################
export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server
export ORACLE_OWNER=oracle
export ORACLE_SID=XE
export SQLPLUS=$ORACLE_HOME/bin/sqlplus
export LSNR=$ORACLE_HOME/bin/lsnrctl
export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH