Oracle Database 12c on Oracle Linux 6 – Introduction

Part of this series of posts: Oracle Database 12c on Oracle Linux 6

My name is Rich Soule. I work as an Enterprise Solution Architect for RFD & Associates a Principal at C2 Consulting (staring in 2015) helping people architect and build hardware and software solutions to business problems, often with Oracle technology. I also teach the Oracle Database Certified Professional curriculum at Austin Community College. I put together this document to help people build Oracle database test systems and/or classroom/learning environments.

We used to build test systems on actual test computers (and we still do sometimes depending on what you are testing) but virtualization technology makes building test systems a breeze, so it is often leveraged for test systems today. When Oracle acquired Sun they also acquired VirtualBox, a free tool for building virtual machines. We’re going to use Oracle VirtualBox for this installation, but you could just skip the VirtualBox portion and use the guide to build an Oracle Linux desktop system on physical hardware if you wish.

Some notes:

Passwords – After doing demos for many years, I learned that it’s very hard to forget a password for a demo/test system if the password is always the same as the username. Thus the password for root ends up being root and the password for oracle ends up being oracle. In the administrative world we call these accounts ‘Joes’. Joes are highly unsecure and should never be used for any type of production system, nor should they be used for test systems where security matters. If security doesn’t matter, then Joes are perfect. When it comes to creating database passwords, Oracle Database 12c doesn’t let you do that out of the box so we’ll be using (at least initially) oracle_4U as the password for all oracle accounts (although I might advise you to turn them into Joes later).

Test – Yep, this is a document for building a test system and not even a real test system, but instead just a system that you can use to test out various features of Oracle or maybe as a classroom environment. In no way am I suggesting that you use these exact steps to build a production system although you’ll probably want to leverage quite a bit of the knowledge gained in your own systems. Just make sure that you are following best practices, especially as it relates to security.

Windows 7 – This guide was developed on my Windows 7 computer. I’m not sure if this will work on Windows 8 or any other host OS for that matter. It might, it might not. Remember that Microsoft added in a bunch of ‘security’ stuff to Windows so from time to time during the install process you may get User Access Control windows that pop up. I just accept whatever changes are going to be made. Obviously you’ll need administrative privileges on your computer to do this install.

Firefox – I used Firefox 24 during the Windows portion of this install. If you are using a different browser (Chrome, IE, or an older version of Firefox, or even something else), you’ll have to adjust what you’re doing to fit your browser of choice.

Screenshots – Some of them may be just a bit different than what you’ll see. I had already installed VirtualBox and built other VMs. Also I moved some of the screen shots around and took screen shots on different days, so ignore the time changes and background color changes that may pop up from time to time.

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