Oracle XE is the 10g version light Data Base implementation for developers and DBAs who wants to make local tests.
It installs downloading the executable file from the Oracle’s web. I had installed the Windows version, virtualizing my Windows XP over VirtualBox (>>) on my Ubuntu.
For administering the Data Base we have a web application at http://192.168.0.7:8080/apex/:
You can take an idea about the hardware requirements, in my basic installation, the data base fits 605 MB RAM and 880 MB of hard disc. You can see it in the last figure.
Now we will create a data base to host the data of our application. In the web administration application click on Administration > Database Users > Create User, and we create the user school with the same password, checking all the system privileges for it:
Then we have create the school schema, with a user with all the privileges to develop in the data base.
Before access from a remote connection we must activate the option Administration>Manage HTTP Access > Available from local server and remote clients, in the web console.
After that we can connect from any application: Eclipse, JDeveloper, PL/SQL Developer, SQLDeveloper,… In the following screenshot I show how to connect from eclipse even it is our favorite IDE, and with a single screenshot we can see the needed configuration for the connection:
