Three and half years have passed since my first attempts to install Oracle 10g on an unsupported Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Seeing that Oracle 11g is out, and exclusively for Linux at this time, I decided to download it among the first and see and share with you what it's installation looks like.

The distribution can be downloaded from the Oracle Database Software Downloads page, but let me warn you upfront that the archive is 1.7GB in size, so you'll need quite a big pipe to successfully download it. What makes it even harder is that Oracle insists that you download it from browser window (Wget and similar utilities won't work out of the box, although there are some tricks that can be deployed), so be prepared to have that browser window open for a long time and prey that download doesn't break along the way.

Feature freeze for version 8.2 took place on August 1st, 2006. This release adds many functionality and performance improvements that were requested by users, including:

• Query language enhancements including INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE RETURNING, multi-row VALUES lists, and optional target-table alias in UPDATE/DELETE
• Index creation without blocking concurrent INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE operations
• Many query optimization improvements, including support for reordering outer joins
• Improved sorting performance with lower memory usage
• More efficient locking with better concurrency
• More efficient vacuuming
• Easier administration of warm standby servers
• New FILLFACTOR support for tables and indexes
• Monitoring, logging, and performance tuning additions
• More control over creating and dropping objects
• Table inheritance relationships can be defined for and removed from pre-existing tables
• COPY TO can copy the output of an arbitrary SELECT statement
• Array improvements, including nulls in arrays
• Aggregate-function improvements, including multiple-input aggregates and SQL:2003 statistical functions
• Many /contrib improvements

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness.

One of the PostgreSQL's most sophisticated features is so called Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), a standard technique for avoiding conflicts between reads and writes of the same object in database. MVCC guarantees that each transaction sees a consistent view of the database by reading non-current data for objects modified by concurrent transactions. Thanks to MVCC, PostgreSQL has great scalability, a robust hot backup tool and many other nice features comparable to the most advanced commercial databases.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released versions 8.1.4, 8.0.8, 7.4.13 and 7.3.15. This is an urgent update to close a serious security hole which can permit a SQL injection attack on some applications running PostgreSQL.

Is running Oracle10g on Debian Linux possible? Oh yes, definitely! And it runs great, really. It's even easier to install than the older versions of Oracle as there are no problems with incompatible libc library & other bugs. You need to make just two simple preparations before you can enjoy your new development database.