Whilst I was sat in a hotel in Delhi and having a casual chat over a cool beer, I was surprised that my companion had not heard of Oracle XE. Maybe I was surprised because he was a user of Oracle (a developer using Perl DBD/DBI interfacing with Oracle within Intec Singl.eView).
It was this link from Transentia about Jailer that made me recall that earlier conversation. Whilst on-site at ENERGEX we started using XE as a ‘free’ private instance of their real-time distribution database. For development, in concert with Oracle SQL Developer, it was perfect. I could ask our Oracle admin to dump the production database and reload into our private instances.
Now what we didn’t have was a tool like Jailer. The ability to shrink down a large database and keep referential integrity is a fantastic facility. I am a proponent of private replicated development areas or sandpits. If you want your developers working optimally, give them everything they need on their own private system. Can’t recreate infrastructure? Consider that simulators as harnesses are easily created now that scripting languages are so much more advanced!
