Installation steps

Local install

• Download and install a version of Oracle Database. For example Oracle Express or Oracle Standard Edition.
• Download the corresponding Oracle JDBC Drivers and copy the JAR (e.g. ojdbc8.jar in WEB-INF/lib/)
• Start Oracle and connect to it with a DBA or system user. For example use the Oracle SQL*Plus command-line tool: connect system;
• Create the user for the main wiki:
  create user xwiki
  identified by xwiki;
• (Optional) Create a tablespace (files to hold database data). This is optional as Oracle provides a default USERS tablespace which is used when you create a user as above without specifying a tablespace:
  • List existing tablespaces:
    select * from dba_data_files;
  • Create an xwiki tablespace (adjust the `datafile` path by checking from the listed existing tablespaces), giving it enough space, and then make sure that the XWIKI user uses it:
    • Create the custom tablespace:
      create tablespace xwiki
      datafile '/opt/<SOMETHING>/oracle/oradata/<SID>/<PDB>/xwiki01.dbf'
      size 1m
      autoextend on
      maxsize 1g
      ;
    • Modify the XWIKI user to use it, and make sure it has quotas on it (by default it doesn't):
      alter user xwiki
      default tablespace xwiki
      temporary tablespace temp
      ;
      alter user xwiki quota unlimited on xwiki
      ;
  • If you use the default USERS tablespace you may still want to make it large enough. For example:
    alter database datafile '/opt/<SOMETHING>/oradata/<SID>/<PDB>/users01.dbf' resize 100M;
• Give sufficient privileges to the xwiki user:
  grant create session to xwiki;
  grant create table to xwiki;
  grant create sequence to xwiki;
• Tell XWiki to use Oracle. To do this, edit the WEB-INF/hibernate.cfg.xml file where you have expanded the XWiki WAR file and uncommented the Oracle part. Make sure to review the connection.url property. For example a typical Oracle Express would be:<property name="connection.url">jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:<SID></property>
  Information

  XE is the default name of the ORACLE SID created by default by the installation for Oracle Express. If it is another you should change it. You can find the correct SID in app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/NETWORK/ADMIN/tnsnames.ora in the Oracle installation directory (for Windows).

From a VM

An easy to test Oracle is to use a VM. Here are some easy steps:

• Download the VM from the Oracle web site
• Install VirtualBox and import the VM in it
• Note: I had to configure the VM network settings to use the "Bridged Adapter" instead of "NAT" in order to be able see it from my host machine
• Start the VM and log in as oracle/oracle
• Note that IP address printed in the shell that opens up, for example: 192.168.0.49
• In the shell, starts the manager: emctl start dbconsole
• Execute all the instructions above in the shell to create the xwiki database (don't forget to download the JDBC driver and put it in WEB-INF/lib). Tip: Put the following in a file (for example xwiki.sql located on the Desktop) and execute echo @Desktop/xwiki.sql | sqlplus system/oracle@orcl
  :
  drop user xwiki cascade;
  create user xwiki identified by xwiki;
  select * from dba_data_files;
  create tablespace xwiki datafile '/home/oracle/app/oracle/oradata/orcl/xwiki01.dbf' size 1m autoextend on maxsize 1g;
  alter user xwiki default tablespace xwiki temporary tablespace temp;
  alter user xwiki quota unlimited on xwiki;
  grant create session to xwiki;
  grant create table to xwiki;
  grant create sequence to xwiki;
• From your host machine, point your browser on http://192.168.0.49:1158/em and connect as system/oracle
• In your XWiki's hibernate.cfg.xml, use:
  <property name="connection.url">jdbc:oracle:thin:@192.168.0.49:1521:orcl</property>
• Don't forget to drop the Oracle JDBC driver in your WEB-INF/lib directory!
• Enjoy

Using Docker

Follow these steps:

• Start Oracle: docker run --name oracle-xwiki -d -p 1521:1521 -v [<host mount point>:]/opt/oracle/oradata xwiki/oracle-database:19.3.0-se2
• Download the corresponding JDBC driver and put it in XWiki's WEB-INF/lib directory
• Edit XWiki's hibernate.cfg.xml file, comment out the Oracle section and make sure you use the following settings:
  <property name="hibernate.connection.url">jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521/xwiki</property>
  <property name="hibernate.connection.username">xwiki</property>
  <property name="hibernate.connection.password">xwiki</property>

And if you need to execute some SQL command you can do the following:

• Connect inside the docker container with: docker -it exec <container id> bash -l
• Run sqplplus with one of:
  • sqlplus system/xwiki@//localhost:1521/XWIKI to execute commands in the XWiki PDB
  • sqlplus sys/xwiki@//localhost:1521/XWIKICDB as sysdba if you need to execute commands in the CDB

Multi wiki support

Indexes

See Database Administration.

Troubleshooting

ORA-01400: cannot insert NULL into ("XWIKI"."XWIKILARGESTRINGS"."XWL_ID")

This error can appear if you're using Oracle JDBC driver 10.2.0.1.0. The solution is to use version 10.2.0.2 or greater of the driver.

SetString can only process strings of less than 32766 chararacters

If you see an error that says something like this:

Then that's because Oracle has a limitation of 32K for CLOBs. To overcome it you need to add the following 2 properties in the hibernate.cfg.xml file, as specified in the installation steps section above:

NullPointerException at HqlSqlWalker

This is actually caused by a wrong Oracle ojdbc JAR being used. There are different JARs for every different minor version of Oracle. For example if you use the JDBC connector for Oracle 11g version 11.2.0.4.0 and your Oracle db version is 11.2.0.1.0 then you'll have the problem.

Errors due to missing RAM

If you see one of the following errors in the XWiki logs, it may simply be that you don't allocate enough RAM to Oracle. This is especially true if you're running it in a VM or in a Docker Container. For example we know that 2GB is not enough for Oracle and 2.5GB+ is ok.

Note that it's possible to have these errors for other reasons too but you should at least check that the RAM is enough.