Alison Holloway's Blog

I haven't blogged for a while as I've been holidaying in Thailand, but I thought it's time to get back into nerding instead of laying on beaches. (Did I just say that?!)

So, first thing I try to do is deinstall one of my Oracle Database XE installs, but I'd done a few things to the file system that made it impossible to remove using the standard deinstall procedure. After searching through the Oracle XE doc, I found this little gem to manually remove XE. I wanted to share it as I've had to do this a couple of times now. The first time I didn't know this trick and had to reinstall the o/s, just before a demo at a conference. It was a tiny bit stressful.

First off, check to see what Oracle RPMs are installed, and try removing them.

rpm -qa | grep oracle

rpm -e oracle-xe-univ

If you get an error here, move on to the next steps to manually remove XE. Remove the XE directories.

rm -Rf /usr/lib/oracle/xe
rm -Rf /etc/oratab
rm -Rf /etc/init.d/oracle-xe
rm -Rf /etc/sysconfig/oracle-xe

Hey presto! Your system no longer has any XE files and you can start again. Like I'm doing right now.