Skip to main content

Simple, quick and easy steps to run an Oracle Database in your development environment using Docker without overloading your machine

Introduction

In our development environment, besides being easy and fast to use, above all, we need a lightweight version of it to run locally, right? I have tested different Oracle images and this was the option that best work for me. In this post i will show you how you can run the Oracle Database Express Edition version on your local machine quickly and easily and also how to connect to it using Oracle SQL Developer IDE and SQL*Plus.

How to do it

Basically we just need two simple steps to get our Oracle database running on our local environment. First we need to login to the Oracle Container Registry so we can pull the image from it and then we just need to run it in a container.

You can find more information by going to the Oracle Container Registry, under the "Browse Containers", click into Database and next click in the express Repository for the Oracle Database Express Edition.

I am going to skip the docker pull step, because docker run will do it for us automatically if it can not find the image locally.

Use the following command to login into Oracle Container Registry with your username and password from the Oracle web site:
docker login container-registry.oracle.com

Run the following docker run command with the -e flag, short for --env, to already set your password for Orcale SYS user. This way you do not need to change it or look for it later.
docker run -d --name oracle --shm-size=1gb -p 1521:1521 -p 5500:5500 -e ORACLE_PWD=CHOOSE_YOUR_PASSWORD container-registry.oracle.com/database/express:latest

You can also run the Docker command with the -v flag to save the database files on your local machine so you do not loose all of them when the container is removed, but this will also take much more time to start up. 
docker run -d --name oracle --shm-size=1gb -p 1521:1521 -p 5500:5500 -v ~/Documents/oracle:/opt/oracle/oradata -e ORACLE_PWD=CHOOSE_YOUR_PASSWORD container-registry.oracle.com/database/express:latest

You can run the following commands to find out if the Oracle Database is ready to use:
docker logs oracle
If you want to see more information from your logs, you can also run it like this:
docker logs oracle --detail
If you got the "DATABASE IS READY TO USE" message from your docker logs command you have all you need to connect to the database.

Acessing Enterprise Manager

This image also have configured the Express version of the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM). As defined in the Orcale web site, "Oracle Enterprise Manager is Oracle’s on-premise management platform that provides a single dashboard to manage all of your Oracle deployments, in your data center or in the cloud.". To access the OEM Express from your browser go to the following address. Don't forget the https part, otherwise it will not work.
https://localhost:5500/em/

If you got lock up from the browser admin page, just type in your keyboard: thisisunsafe, to get in.

One last step we need to do. Enter the right name for the Oracle v$containers. For our version you can enter CDB$ROOT like is shown in the image below. You can read more about it here.
You should see the following Oracle Enterprise Manager Express web page:


Using SQL*Plus

Using docker exec -it command, we can enter in the database container to run SQL commands directly. You just need to run the following docker command:
docker exec -it oracle sqlplus / as sysdba

Note that I have used oracle here because that is my container name. If you give a different name, just change for the one you gave.

Let's see how to create an user using SQL*Plus. Run the previous command to get access to the SQL CLI.

If you try to run the SQL CREATE USER command now you will get the following error:
To solve that we need to alter our session so we can create our new user: 
ALTER SESSION SET "_ORACLE_SCRIPT"=true;
Before we can connect to Oracle Database Express Edition we need to grant our user the CREATE SESSION, otherwise we will get the following error.

GRANT CREATE SESSION TO YOUR_USERNAME;
Let's grant now permission to our new user to create table, views and sequences: 
GRANT CREATE TABLE, CREATE VIEW, CREATE SEQUENCE TO YOUR_USERNAME;

Using SQL Developer

Let's use Oracle SQL Developer IDE to connect to our new Oracle database.

Since our database server is already running and we have created our user and given the necessary permissions to him, you should now been able to connect to your database server using SQL Developer and receive a success status message back when testing your connection.

Note that we entered xe as our System Identifier - SID. This is needed for the Express Edition.

Conclusion

In this post i tried to address the main difficulties and how to solve some problems that you may encounter and mainly, I tried to show how we can quickly run a local instance with an Oracle database for development.

Additional Commands

If you need to stop and remove your container you can simply run:
docker stop oracle && docker rm oracle

Additional Reference

Oracle Container Registry
Oracle Database Express Edition
Oracle SQL Developer
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Log Aggregation with ELK stack and Spring Boot

Introduction In order to be able to search our logs based on a key/value pattern, we need to prepare our application to log and send information in a structured way to our log aggregation tool. In this article I am going to show you how to send structured log to ElasticSearch using Logstash as a data pipeline tool and how to visualize and filter log information using Kibana. According to a definition from the Wikipedia website: Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. According to Elasticsearch platform website , Elasticsearch is the heart of the Elastic stack, which centrally stores your data for lightning fast search. The use of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash as a search platform is commonly known as the ELK stack. Next we are going to start up Elasticsearch, Kibana and Logstash using docker so we can better underst
Post a Comment
Read more

Selection Sort Explained

Introduction If you are trying to get a remote job in a top IT consulting company, you will definitely fall into a live code exercise where your algorithms, logical thinking and problem solving skills will be tested and you will have to demonstrate a solid knowledge of these concepts. Today I decided to write about a type of sorting algorithm that I found several times in interviews and decided, after studying the approach used, to create an initial solution in the simplest possible way. Understanding the logic As we know, the sort algorithm basically uses three basic principles to sort the items in a list. A comparator, a swap function, and recursion. For this selection sort algorithm I will focus in the first two. Given that we have the following list of numbers: 64, 25, 12, 22, 11, how would we use selection sort to swap and sort the list in an ascending order? The following code from the init function uses two for loops to create a temporary list (line 2) with the r
Post a Comment
Read more

How to use Splunk SPL commands to write better queries - Part I

Introduction As a software engineer, we are quite used to deal with logs in our daily lives, but in addition to ensuring that the necessary logs are being sent by the application itself or through a service mesh, we often have to go a little further and interact with some log tool to extract more meaningful data. This post is inspired by a problem I had to solve for a client who uses Splunk as their main data analysis tool and this is the first in a series of articles where we will delve deeper and learn how to use different Splunk commands. Running Splunk with Docker To run Splunk with docker, just run the following command: docker run -d —rm -p 8000:8000 -e SPLUNK_START_ARGS=--accept-license -e SPLUNK_PASSWORD=SOME_PASSWORD --name splunk splunk/splunk:latest Sample Data We are going to use the sample data provided by Splunk. You can find more information and download the zip file from their web site . How does it work? In order to be able to interact with Splunk t
Post a Comment
Read more