Running Oracle XE on Amazon EC2

a few weeks ago it was this time again. for development of a certain mule esb flow i needed an oracle database to test a jdbc transport enhancement to obtain out parameters from a stored procedure. as soon as this happens i install an oracle xe database which doesn’t take to much time so i can proceed with the work i really have to do. however sine a couple of years i am using my mac for development (and loving it) and as you might know there is no oracle xe release that runs on a mac.
what i used to do is to instantiate a debian instance as a vmware guest and install xe on that. unfortunately i tend too loose these vmware images if i don’t use them for 3 months or so. so that brought me to the idea to just run the database on a server in the cloud. if i can use a micro instance from amazon for that it shouldn’t cost too much .
at first i hoped for a community ami to be available to install. unfortunately this isn’t the case, most likely because of license agreement that you have to accept when you download xe. luckily i found this article explaining all steps. i went through it step by step and now have my own xe instance running in the cloud. of course i also created a (private) ami of it so i can terminate this instance when the project is over and recreate a new one if i might need it again in the future.
by the way two step i did slightly different. first instead of using the certificates on the amazon linux host i made use of the access_key and secret_key by adding these to the ‘.bash_profile like’ this:

export aws_access_key=***
export aws_secret_key=****

secondly i performed the following sql statement to open up the apex administration console from access different then ‘localhost’:

 exec dbms_xdb.setlistenerlocalaccess(false);

so now i am the lucky developer with an oracle instance in the cloud which will always be there if i need it