Dear StackOverflow Community, i have bought myself a MacBook Pro M1 Pro 2021 and I need for my school a running instance of Oracle 18c or 21c Express Edition. I have tried creating a VM and running a docker inside of it, but it obviously did not work. I have also tried running a docker in Docker Desktop directly on my Mac. I have been using the docker-images provided by oracle, but nothing worked. Regards, Daniel
There are two issues here:
Oracle Database is not supported on ARM processors, only Intel. See here: https://github.com/oracle/docker-images/issues/1814
Oracle Database Docker images are only supported with Oracle Linux 7 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 as the host OS. See here: https://github.com/oracle/docker-images/tree/main/OracleDatabase/SingleInstance
Oracle Database ... is supported for Oracle Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7. For more details please see My Oracle Support note: Oracle Support for Database Running on Docker (Doc ID 2216342.1)
The referenced My Oracle Support Doc ID goes on to say that the database binaries in their Docker image are built specifically for Oracle Linux hosts, and will also work on Red Hat. That's it.
Because Docker provides process level virtualization it still pulls kernel and other OS libraries from the underlying host OS. A Docker image built for Oracle Linux needs an Oracle Linux host; it doesn't bring the Oracle Linux OS with it. Only Oracle Linux or Red Hat Linux are supported for any Oracle database Linux installation, with or without Docker. Ubuntu, Mac OS, Debian, or any other *NIX flavor will not provide predictable reliable results, even if it is hacked into working or the processes appear to work normally ("works" and "supported" are not the same thing).
Bottom Line: You won't be able to run an Oracle database on that hardware.