Srikanth Technologies

How to configure Oracle to start manually

Once Oracle is installed in a system, it starts automatically whenever you boot the system. We need Oracle to start automatically on Server. However, on a standalone development system, we may prefer to start Oracle only when it is required and not automatically whenever system starts. This is especially important considering the fact that Oracle, when running, takes considerable amount of system resources.

That brings us to two important questions:

How to disable autostart feature of Oracle?

When Oracle is installed, apart from the rest of the stuff, a couple of services are installed. These services are configured to start automatically whenever system starts. The following are the services that we are concerned with. Instancename is XE in case of Oracle Express Edition. For other editions it varies depending on the installation.

So to disable auto-start feature of Oracle, configure these services to start manually as follows:

  1. Go to Control Panel
  2. Select Administrative Tools
  3. Select Services application
  4. When list of services are listed, go to the services listed above and select Properties option from Context Menu(right click to get it).

    In Properties window (as shown above), change Startup type to Manual (default is Automatic).

  5. Click on Ok
Do the same for the other service (Oracle<instancename>TNSListener) also.

How to manually start or stop Oracle?

Once we disable auto-start feature of Oracle, we need to start Oracle manually whenever we need to work with it. For this purpose Oracle has provided Start Database and Stop Database options in its menu.
  1. Select Oracle Database 10g Express Edition menu or something similar to this depending upon your Oracle version
  2. Select Start Database option to start Oracle or Stop Database to stop Oracle that is currently running
It is also possible to start and stop Oracle instance by starting and stopping services that we discussed earlier. For this, go to service in the Services window and click on Stop or Start button as the case may be.

For example to start/stop Oracle Database 10g Express Edition, you can start/stop OracleServiceXE and OracleXETNSListener services.