OK – started to play with XE a little whilst it’s hot off the press…

It installed fine after the issue with swap not being big enough in relation to memory as I mentioned here although I’m still waiting for my registration email to arrive…

I started the HTMLdb interface up and after reading the manuals saw that I could log in with SYSTEM/ and that worked fine…from there I used the Administration/Manage Database Users link to create a “normal” user called JEFF which I’ll play with later.

On the server side I figured I’d next try and login using good old SQL*Plus – which proved a little less straightforward. typing sqlplus resulted in this:

bash: sqlplus: command not found

OK – need some path setting stuff – like an ORACLE_HOME and adding ORACLE_HOME/bin to the PATH environment variable…but where exactly is home ? Well, after a bit of digging on the HTMLDb interface I found where the datafiles for the database were:

..I figured the product files would be close to here and eventually found them in:

/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server

I modified the environment to setup ORACLE_HOME as the path above and added $ORACLE_HOME/bin to the PATH.

I then tried again to login to the database with sqlplus. I didn’t know what the TNSNAMES.ORA entry for the database would be but I assumed that as I was local to the machine it would use the bequeath adaptor – it didn’t and it wouldn’t login giving me the error below:

Looking at the file:

$ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/tnsnames.ora

showed an entry for XE as the database which I then tried and successfully logged in to SQL*Plus:

That’s enough for one night.