[Building Sakai] Best wat for a Mac Guy to get Oracle Test Instance to Test LTI 2.1

[Matthew Jones]

If you've never used EC2 you can get a free micro tier to run Oracle on,
otherwise they charge about double per hour their regular instance for the
licensing. (0.140 an hour for small [1] compared to 0.060 typically) I've
found that even running Windows and Linux that's certainly the easiest way
to deal with Oracle. Installing on Linux was a complete pain and the
version EC2 gives is the Standard rather than the Express. Windows probably
would be easier, but still Express edition.

Getting the AMI running isn't too bad, figuring out all the commands to
administer it and get it going again after a restart was the most time
consuming part. Often I'd just delete the image rather than try to figure
out how to drop databases/tables/users. It's all very easy in Mysql. I
never found a good guide for Oracle. I think I used this guide to setup
[2]. The last line "now you can start playing" was the one with the missing
details! ;) Basically in Mysql I'm used to dropping the database then
letting Sakai reload everything fresh to retest. Or loading up Sakai,
configuring it like I want and using mysqldump when it's in a good state
and loading from that. I don't know how to do that yet in Oracle, but I'm
sure it's not super difficult. . . Though it's not super easy either! ;)
[4]

Some of the other problems I had with EC2 was with IP management and
Oracle. If you shut it down (which you might eventually), you lose the IP.
You can get an Elastic IP but you have to manually reassign it to the
instance. Oracle really wants a static IP so before starting up the
instance I've shut down, I have to remember to reassign the Elastic IP and
start it up, then I had the instance configured to use that rather than the
random private one so I can connect from the outside. You can do a little
extra work to automate this [4] but still I do it manually since I've only
got a few instances at the moment.

Anyway, plan to spend at least a few hours on this, I think it always takes
me at least a half hour just logging into the Oracle site to get the closed
source jdbc driver. ;)

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle/
[2]
http://www.pythian.com/blog/how-to-get-started-with-amazon-ec2-oracle-11g-xe-example/
[3] http://www.oraclenerd.com/2011/09/drop-database.html
[4]
http://www.idevelopment.info/data/AWS/AWS_Tips/AWS_Management/AWS_14.shtml



On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Charles Severance <csev at umich.edu> wrote:

> Hi all, I need to do some testing on LTI 2.1 on an orgacle instance -
> mostly just the conversions.
>
> Is there a decent way of making Oracle work for Mac people.   Is there an
> EC2 I could spin up for a few hours that has a working free demo Oracle?
>
> Last time I used a Windows box - and open ports and it caught a virus :)
> I guess I could do that again - just close down the ports afterwards :)
>
> Any help appreciated.
>
> /Chuck
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