Getting started with Oracle Database in a Docker container!

One of the benefits of using Docker is quick and easy provisioning. I wanted to find out first-hand if this could help me get an Oracle Enterprise Edition database quickly up and running for use in a development environment. Oracle provides Docker images for its Standard and Enterprise Edition database in the Oracle Container Registry. Lucas Jellema has already provided two blogs on this (here and here) which have been a useful starting point. In this blog I'll describe some of the choices to make and challenges I encountered. To summarize, I'm quite happy with the Docker images in the registry as they provide a very easy way to automate the install of an EE database. You can find a Vagrant provisioning shell script with the installation of Docker and Docker commands to execute here and a description on how to use it here.

Quickly create a Virtualbox development VM with XE DB using Kickstart, Packer, Vagrant

The topic of quickly creating an Oracle development VM is not new. Several years ago Edwin Biemond and Lucas Jellema have written several blogs about this and have given presentations about the topics at various conferences. You can also download ready made Virtualbox images from Oracle here and specifically for SOA Suite here.

Over the years I have created a lot (probably 100+) of virtual machines manually. For SOA Suite, the process of installing the OS, installing the database, installing WebLogic Server, installing SOA Suite itself can be quite time consuming and boring if you have already done it so many times. Finally my irritation has passed the threshold that I need to automate it! I wanted easily recreate a clean environment with a new version of specific software. This blog is a start; provisioning an OS and installing the XE database on it. It might seem a lot but this blog contains the knowledge of two days work. This indicates it is relatively easy to get started with these things.

I decided to start from scratch and first create a base Vagrant box using Packer which uses Kickstart. Kickstart is used to configure the OS of the VM such as disk partitioning scheme, root password and initial packages. Packer makes using Kickstart easy and allows easy creation of a Vagrant base box. After the base Vagrant box was created, I can use Vagrant to create the Virtualbox machine, configure it and do additional provisioning such as in this case installing the Oracle XE database.