This is old news and although VirtualBox is well documented I haven’t again found a single resource that is describing the process from top to bottom for my setup which is a Macbook Pro using WiFi therefore this detailed tutorial. The people at Oracle have acknowledged this problem and have provided a neat solution abstracting all the complicated noise, packing up all the required tools and needed configurations in a single image file readily to be hosted as a VM in VirtualBox. I have to admit that this long-winded process gets too complicated for my taste and patience.

I have yet to find a consistent resource online of how to natively install the database and I have also tried my hands on binaries compilation and package transfers along all the previous versions with various, inconsistent results. Official support was dropped from 10g onwards around the early days of Mac OS X and since then there has been endless questions online of how to go about later versions like Leopard (10.5), Snow Leopard (10.6), Lion (10.7), Mountain Lion (10.8) or Mavericks (10.9).

Installing Oracle DB on any Mac OS version is not an easy task. Now it has been revised for the latest Oracle 12cR1 DB. Update: This guide has been originally written 2 years ago describing Oracle 11gR2 DB installation.

Database for mac lion