for college, we run oracle on a win2k3 server that's run on a virtual system like VMware and/or Virtual PC. VMware has it bells and whistles, and makes a nifty gadget, but eats my laptop's resources like there's no tomorrow. So I got rid of the VMware image and VMware itself, and wanted to switch to VPC.
Another problem I have, is that I barely have any diskspace left to work with, and those images are at least 4 GB.

So I wondered if anyone knew a program that would act as Oracle, but solely for the purpose of testing databases. I have two .db files that I need to use and so far, the only programs I've come across that would "test" a database required a server of some sorts and only worked with .sql query files.

A trial's ok, but if possible, freeware would be awesome ^^

Thanks in advance!

For testing purposes, you could imagine installing Oracle 9i on your workstation.
Go to http://www.oracle.com/technology//index.html , sign for a free Oracle registration. You will probably have to explain that you want to learn how to install and use Oracle.
It's free for learning purposes.
A standard Oracle can be installed on any standalone Windows workstation, it can be installed on your laptop if you have enough memory.
However, remember that you can use it for learning, you cannot use a free licence for making money with an application !
Regards
Yordan

Use Oracle 10G express, It is a more compact version and will need only memory. On my installation it eats up 600MB of my 1 gig memory. I set it up that way.

By the way, when you turn on error logging as i use to, it can eat a lot of disk space since error logs can sometimes reach up to 300mb a piece.. mostly the file size is 1mb.

*eep*
Thank you both for your kind replies, I appreciate it very much!
My textbook comes with a "demo version" of 10g, I believe. I didn't bother checking it, since I though it required the user to set it up as a server or whatnot. I turned to Virtual PC, however, and I got my hands on an image from college with windows server 2k3 and an install for Oracle already on it. It runs like a dream.
Much faster, stable and less resource-demanding than VMware. The entire setup needed about 5 gigs of space.

I was surprised that there weren't any Oracle-based programs that could let someone test sql on databses, though.

Thanks again for the swift responses!

Oracle 10g Express is a free version that is so cool because it is like its big brother the Oracle 10g Enterprise edition most of their features are the same except that Oracle 10g Express was strip out of those enterprise stuffs like Clustering,Geometry (for GIS use) ,etc but the cool thing is that it has its RMAN.TKPROF,etc such thing that you really need if you would just setup a single database not a clustered one

What do you mean? A program to connect only to Oracle and perform queries, is that correct?

*******

If so, please check out TOAD http://www.toadsoft.com/
The site is where to download Toad for Oracle and test the database using direct queries.

You can also use the command interface PL/SQL of Oracle or a much better one is a third party
program called PL/SQL Developer http://www.allroundautomations.com/plsqldev.html

I hope I get it correct..

*******

I mostly use Oracle for desktop programming needs and mySQL for online stuffs.

Have successfully developed an ERP system which uses Oracle as backend database when
using the software online and switch to mySQL 5 for online needs which is a minimal copy
of the much complete LAN version.

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What I want to achieve now is a DBAless setup with Oracle. I am not a DBA and only
got my SKILLS with databases learning on my own and part of it by contributing to mySQL
open source.


CIAO~

I think he mant "how could I perform queries concerning tables in an Oracle datafile (like /data/users01.dbf) without having Oracle installed on my own system ?"
I guess that an oracle RDBMS instance is the only one able to read inside an Oracle database file. Moreover, I'm pretty sure that the database file has to be created on the same system, I mean, a PC with Oracle cannot read directly from an Oracle database created on an AIX or a SUN machine. I already tried things like that in order to recover from system failures, you must have an Oracle installation in order to read datafiles from an Oracle database.
Moreover, you must have all the datafiles (tables, indexes, redo logs, controlfiles etc...)
Regards
Yordan

It is the encryption that i hate about oracle.
It prevents me to traverse backwards to rebuild the broken data without having a copy of oracle.

Ayway, it is the same encryption that i love with oracle.

**********

On the otherside, there are programs available that can extract data from users01.dbf [oracle data file], i dont know how usefull it will be since you still need to patch togeher the table files and table definations plus the other settings and stuff when you extract those data.

Such programs that can do that are rare [in my opinion only], they view the oracle data file the same way Oracle views it. An independent disc with its own file system.

Thanks again for the replies, I really appreciate it.
For now, all I really need to do is indeed grab a database, and run queries on it. That's about it. I think it's kind of a introductory class in preperation for next year's PHP course. This is just a few weeks of class, anyway.

I wasn't aware that the whole deal with oracle based databases are so platform sensitive. I can understand now why they instructed us to run it on a specific virtual machine client.

If you just need a database for running queries on it, you could simply use your Astahost account and create a mysql database. You can simply create the database, and use phpmyadmin in order to query the tables, or you can create your own sql scripts and ask phpmyadmin to execute your scripts.
If it's for your school and if you need to type purely (and barely) sql commands, then you can ask for a ssh account at astahost, then you should be able to access your account in command line mode, without hte php environment if it's not to be use because in the next year's program.
Regards
Yordan