Oracle Database Express Edition for Mac

Question

I start my second semester of university on the 6th of July and one of my subjects is Database Concepts.

For the subject, we must install two programs "Oracle SQL Developer" and 'Oracle Database Express Edition". There is a Mac version Oracle SQL Developer but only Windows or Linux for Oracle Database Express Edition. I tried to install the latter with Docker but keep running into issues. Mainly when I start it there are no logs and I always get this error:

"The Oracle Database is not configured. You must run '/etc/init.d/oracle-xe-18c configure' as the root user to configure the database.

The following output is now a tail of the alert.log:

tail: cannot open '/opt/oracle/diag/rdbms///trace/alert*.log' for reading: No such file or directory

tail: no files remaining"

I have followed this tutorial and done exactly what he does but at timestamp 11:47 you can see that he has log messages while I just have the error posted above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbopSCwATIg

Hoping someone can help me with this, if I can't fix this then I will have to use my Windows partition which isn't very convenient. If there. is no solution to this can someone please recommend an alternative of Oracle Database Express Edition for Mac that is free?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

To run the Oracle Database in MacOS, you have different choices. The most easy ones are:

Oracle Cloud Free Tier
You can setup your free online Oracle Cloud Free Tier environment and configure your local SQL Developer installation to the Cloud environment. https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

For further information about the Cloud Free Tier environment, check the posts https://dgielis.blogspot.com/2019/09/best-and-cheapest-oracle-apex-hosting.html from Dimitri Gielis for detailed instructions on how to do that.

Vagrant/VM (Intel only)
For a local setup, this is the most easy way in my opinion, since I'm not an experienced user of Docker. Oracle has made Virtual Machines available for free, https://github.com/oracle/vagrant-projects

Use the OracleDatabase v21.3.0-XE or v21.3.0 image, if you need the database only. If you intend to use APEX as well , which I can highly recommend, install Oracle APEX after running one of those database vagrants or use the OracleAPEX (v18.4.0-XE) image, if you need it out-of-the-box.

Docker
If you are known to Docker or want to learn it, you can follow the link in @Bjarte Brandt comment https://github.com/bjarteb/oracle-apex-ords. The setup documentation in that link is quite comprehensive.

Update due to Apple's M1/M2 processor
Since Apple introduced new M1/M2 mac's based on the ARM cpu architecture, for a couple of years the only option available was the Oracle Cloud Free Tier. Unfortunately, VirtualBox VM doesn’t support the ARM architecture yet and it doesn’t work with Rosetta..

(18/04/2023) But... I hear rumours these days that indicate that it is now possible to run an Oracle Docker image on an Apple Mac M1/M2 using Colima. I don't own an Apple M1/M2 MacBook, so I cannot verify if it works and/or performs well. Performance still seems to be an issue, but it seems at least now possible to run an Oracle Database on an Apple M1/M2 device. For more information, follow these links and read on:

https://github.com/gvenzl/oci-oracle-free#oracle-database-free-on-apple-m-chips

https://www.salvis.com/blog/2023/04/16/oracle-database-23c-on-a-mac-with-an-m-series-chip/

https://www.dbasolved.com/2022/09/running-x86_64-docker-images-on-mac-m1-max-oracle-database-19c/

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/docker-on-apple-silicon-mac-how-to-run-x86-containers-with-rosetta-2-4a679913a0d5

(13/09/2022) Oracle SQL Developer 22.2.1 is now natively available for MacBook M1/M2 clients. Previous versions would need Rosetta to run. Unfortunately, no signs for VirtualBox supporting ARM yet..

If you own a MAC based on the 'old' Intel processor, you would still have all the options available.