Today I decided that I needed an environment to play with the latest and greatest Oracle RDBMS : 11gR2. This version is only available for Unix platforms, so I needed a virtual environment to get that working on my laptop - running on XP. You can pick any kind of virtualization software, but, due to the recent take-over of Sun by Oracle, I decided to go for what's currently known as Sun's VirtualBox. I guess this product will re-branded to Oracle's VirtualBox somewhere soon. So what are the steps: 1. Download VirtualBox from http://www.virtualbox.org/ and run the installer. 2. Start VirtualBox, click 'New' and enter a Name, Operating and Version for the Virtual machine. This is gonna be a 100% Oracle thing, so I installed Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL). 3. Oracle 11gR2 needs 1Gb of RAM, so set the memory size to 1024 - you can change this afterwards. 4. Create a new boot harddisk with dynamically expanding storage . 5. On the next page you have to set the 'si...