Installing Oracle 10g on Your Mac

On December 22rd, 2004 Oracle released its flagship product, Oracle Database 10g for Mac OS X server. This is an important release for Apple since you can not compete in the enterprise market without the ability to run Oracle on your hardware. Getting Oracle ported to OS X was a coup, no doubt helped along by the fact that his Steveness and Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison are bosom buddies.

The good news is that you don’t need OS X server, or an Xserve, to run Oracle on your Mac; plain old OS X works fine (of course I wouldn’t recommend trying to rollout an Oracle implementation to users running on a Flower Power iMac).

Sergio Leunissen, a product team member on Oracle’s HTMLDB product, is a Mac user and he has written up some very good instructions on how to get Oracle 10g up and running on your Mac. They may look intimidating at first, but if you follow them closely, and the Terminal doesn’t frighten you, it is fairly painless.

You can read up about Oracle 10g on the Mac at Apple’s website and you can download Oracle 10g for the Mac at Oracle’s website.