Recently I had to set up an Oracle 12c database in a container with test data to be used during testing and development. This post is just a quick documentation of that process. The developer tier for Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition is available on Docker hub. It’s available through the store, but is free of charge. On Docker hub, you’ll need to click on the ‘Proceed to Checkout’ button, agree to the terms of service, enter your contact information, and click on the ‘Get Content’ button.

Docker is such a powerful tool to use during development and testing. One use case I had recently was to use docker in testing a VT220 emulator that I wrote. The test cases involved running the emulator against the vttest application to validate the parsing of the escape sequences and data from an ssh server and the rendering of a screen from that server. I created a centos container with the vttest application installed and sshd, so that I could ssh into that container and run the vttest application during my tests.