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