Oracle Express Edition (XE)

Currently, ICAT requires you to use an Oracle database due to various operations that are implemented as triggers.

If you do not have access to a beefed up Oracle RDBMS then Oracle Database 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE) is an excellent alternative. .

XE is an entry-level, small-footprint database based on the Oracle Database 10g Release 2 code base that's free to develop, deploy, and distribute and simple to administer.

Oracle XE uses an embedded http listener that comes with the XML DB (XDB) to serve http requests. The default port for HTTP access is 8080. This may conflict with the default settings of your glassfish server if you do an ICAT installation.

You can determine the current configuration using the following commands when you connect to XE as the oracle user SYSTEM (or any other DBA):



You can change the http port and the ftp port to whatever you like (keep in mind that you need special privileges for ports < 1024 on Unix/Linux systems).



Hopefully, this will spare you some of the pain that I had to go through!

Damian