I was utterly surprised when I found out today that OracleXE installs and runs on Windows 7 Enterprise (32-bit) flawlessly. [Note: I run Windows 7 as a guest inside VirtualBox machine with merely 756MB of RAM].

Can’t even remember when was the last time when I worked with XE. Based on my recent experience with Oracle10g R2 installation on my Windows7 notebook I certainly didn’t expect that OracleXE would install without a hitch, but I’m glad that it did! I decided to test OracleXE on Windows 7 for the purpose of small in-house project, nothing spectacular but nevertheless the care should be taken to properly protect OS and XE database.

I installed OracleXE for Western Europe with LATIN1 and then changed the code page to Eastern Europe LATIN2, more precisely to EE8MSWIN1250 as I already wrote once. I don’t need nor want unicode for this particular project.

Of course, first thing every self-respecting DBA should do after Oracle XE installation is this:

When deployed to production adding at least one additional copy of control file plus redo log mirroring is also something it must be done, unless it’s a “toy” database with worthless data.