Oracle is one of the main players in the commercial database field and most readers will probably have come across it at some point. You can download it freely for non-commercial purposes from http://www.oracle.com

Installing and configuring Oracle is not for the faint of heart. It isn’t really just a simple database, but it is heavy on extra features and technologies which you may not actually want (another Apache web server, multiple JDKs, Orbs etc.) but which are usually installed anyway. So we’ll assume you already have an Oracle installation available. For this example, we’ve used Oracle 10g.