Getting started with Oracle Database 12c

Lately I've been introduced into the amazing world of data integration. For some reasons, that may be clearer in future posts, I'm currently struggling with Oracle Database. Since creating my first sample table was not a totally trivial task I'm going to explain briefly how I did and what tutorial I followed.

First of all, I'm currently working on Windows 7 SP1 (just reinstalled, 'cause of course problems never come alone), and I'm using Oracle Database 12c.

For downloading and installing the database I followed step by step this tutorial, that I found on Oracle's website. The only change was in the username and password chosen.

After that, I tried to connect to Oracle SQL Developer, 'cause I thought it would be nice to have some GUI to exploit, but I had issues in connecting the database so I left this problem unsolved for now and moved on.

Actually I had some issues connecting also using the database from command line. In the end, I found out that what was needed for connecting were just the following commands:

sqlplus /nolog
connect as sysdba
username (in upper case!)
password (in upper case!)

Yes, uppercase. Because of some reasons, you need to insert your credentials in upper case in order to avoid the annoying error "ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied".
Do you think it makes any sense? I doubt.
Anyway, after this revelation I finally managed to insert my first statement in my database, for the record it was:

create table P2 (
    SSN   integer,
    name  varchar(100),
    DOB   date,
    city  varchar(200)
);

Thatof course is needed for the next step, but I'm going to talk about it later on! :)
Hope this little post was helpful!
(Also, I hope I'll get to connect to SQL Developer someday!)