This is kind of old news now, because it’s been in use since SQLEditor 1.2 was released. However I though I would explain how I solved the problem that I was having with installing Oracle.

The problem was that I didn’t have a linux machine with enough memory and at the time, qemu wasn’t really fast enough to run Oracle in a virtual machine.

The first strategy I used was to upgrade the memory in my linux box (Cetaganda) to 512 MB. This solved the memory problem and meant that the testing could continue.

Then Parallels Workstation was released, which was able to run Oracle XE in a virtual machine fast enough for regular use. It also uses a different IP address than the host machine, which is useful in itself for testing.

Parallels is definitely the answer to this problem, I don’t need to switch on another machine, there is no additional noise and the performance is excellent for my purposes. I’m even considering adding the loading of the VM to the unit test setup so it will load automatically before the test cycle starts.

I’ve also got MySQL and Postgres running inside virtual machines.