Compiling and running DBD for Oracle 10g without installing Oracle

• Previous message: Marko Asplund: "Re: DBD::Oracle: which Oracle9i client components needed?"
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To: dbi-users@perl.org
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 14:17:34 +0200

Hello,

I recently had to compile the DBD modules for Oracle 10g on machines,
where I wasn't able to install Oracle. To save others the pain of
figuring out this on their own, here's a short article of the type I was
hoping to find in the first place.

These instructions worked on Sun Solaris 9 and a fragmentary
installation Slackware Linux.

Ingredients:

To compile you need:

DBD-Oracle-1.15 or other recent versions
gcc of recent enough version. I uses 3.3.3, but others should work ok too
perl, DBI etc. of recent enough version
unzip most likely already installed by the OS

Oracle 10g installation disk for your architecture (available at
http://otn.oracle.com/software/products/database/oracle10g/index.html ).
Only the first disk is necessary, which is a 700MB cpio archive.

To run:

perl as used above
DBI and DBD as compiled above
Oracle 10g instant client (available at
http://otn.oracle.com/software/tech/oci/instantclient/index.html ) Only
the basic package is necessary (44MB), although sqlplus is nice to have
too (add 0.5 MB) to test the connections.

Step one: Extracting necessary libraries from Oracle distribution

To compile the Oracle DBD, only a very small subset of the Oracle
installation are necessary. These files can easily be extracted directly
without the need to install Oracle. For me, this was critical, as I was
very short on disk space on my machine and the Oracle installer was
complaining about my version of Linux. It wasn't red-hat enough for it's
taste.

Once the cpio-archive is unpacked, you'll have many files jar files in a
directory tree in the directory Disk1. The Oracle installer is a Java
application that works itself through all Java packages installing
whatever necessary on the way. Fortunately, the files necessary to
compile DBD can easy extracted with a normal unzip from these archives:

Disk1/stage/Components/oracle.rdbms.oci/10.1.0.2.0/1/DataFiles/include.jar
Disk1/stage/Components/oracle.rsf.rdbms_rsf/10.1.0.2.0/1/DataFiles/lib.jar
Disk1/stage/Components/oracle.rdbms/10.1.0.2.0/1/DataFiles/lib.jar
Disk1/stage/Components/oracle.rsf.clntsh_rsf/10.1.0.2.0/1/DataFiles/lib.jar

Just run unzip whatever.jar in your temporary ORACLE_HOME directory
(later referred to as /tmp/foo). If disk-space is really tight, you
could just extract with cpio those 4 files.

Step two: Compiling DBD-Oracle

After unzipping the necessary files into your /tmp/foo directory, set
ORACLE_HOME temporarily to this directory with

export ORACLE_HOME=/tmp/foo

DBD-Oracle can now be compiled and installed as per instruction in the
fine README-files. On Linux, you're done.

Step two-bis: Compiling DBD-Oracle under Solaris with gcc

The perl version distributed by Sun in the default installation is
compiled with a sun compiler. If the only compiler you have is gcc from
http://www.sunfreeware.com, making compatible libraries isn't easy. A
better guess would be to get perl 5.8 from sunfreeware too, which is
already compiled with gcc.

Unfortunately, Oracle 10g is distributed as 64-bit libraries only and
the perl version from sunfreeware is a 32-bit executable. If you try to
link you get complains about 'wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64'. The only way
to resolve this I found was to recompile perl in 64 bit mode from
sources. This is pretty much straight forward, just make sure you
include full 64-bit support.

If file $(which perl) gives you:

/usr/bin/perl: ELF 64-bit MSB executable SPARCV9 Version 1 [...
blablabla ...]

you're set. If however it returns:

/usr/bin/perl: ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1 [... blablabla
...]

it's compilation time.

With a 64-bit version of perl, compiling DBD-Oracle poses no problems,
continue at step two.

As usual on Solaris, don't forget to include in you path /usr/ccs/bin so
that you can access make and the like.

Step three: Installing Oracle 10g instant Client

See the instructions by Oracle for this step. The instant client
packages contain only a few libraries. It doesn't set up your oracle
environment, so you have to create your $ORACLE_HOME directory on your own.

If you'd like to use a tnsnames.ora file for name resolution, you should
   either create them in $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin and set $ORACLE_HOME
accordingly or set $TNS_ADMIN properly.

You also should make sure, that your programs find the oracle libraries
by setting $LD_LIBRARY_PATH properly.

If you installed sqlplus, you now should be able to access the databases
of your choice.

Step four: Running DBI programs

If DBD has been properly compiled and the instant client is properly
installed, you now can access Oracle databases with DBI from you perl
programs.

I hope, these hints help some of you out there.

• Previous message: Marko Asplund: "Re: DBD::Oracle: which Oracle9i client components needed?"
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