[NBLUG/talk] Missing Oracle driver for Perl DBI

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Mon, May 29, 2006 at 07:12:23PM -0700, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> It seems that the Oracle driver for the Perl DBI was included on the lab 
> computers at SSU (at least in the Salazar labs), but it doesn't seem to 
> be present on my Debian/testing box (and the DBI doesn't seem to be 
> included at all on MacOS X).  And I can't figure out which Debian 
> package (if any) provides the Oracle driver for the Perl DBI!
> 
> Do I actually need to install Oracle in order to get the Oracle driver 
> for the Perl DBI?  Or is there another way?

Oracle's standard installation is very difficult to package.  The express
and instant versions appear easier.  In fact, I've managed to get a
perl-DBD-Oracle RPM built against the instantclient packages with an
intermediate set of dependency fixing RPMs to make it all work.

In addition to the complexity issues, there's the licensing issues of
redistributing Oracle's proprietary code.

http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/oracle-install.html
http://www.the-love-shack.net/oracle-on-sid.html#ds
http://linux.togaware.com/survivor/Oracle_10g.html
http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/oracle.htm
http://oss.oracle.com/debian/
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/oci/instantclient/

You shouldn't need to install the "server", just the client and development
stuff.

Then you'll very likely need to install DBD::Oracle by hand.

http://search.cpan.org/~pythian/DBD-Oracle-1.17/

(there's help with getting it compiled against instantclient or the XE
version, since those are new.  Checking out stuff from SVN might be the way
to go, even...)

(I deal with Oracle on RHEL all the time at work.  Oracle on a supported
platform is difficult enough, I wouldn't want to deal with it on something
unsupported like Debian)
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder, Scribe and InstallFest Coordinator
The North Bay Linux Users Group -- http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at fn AIM: falschfreiheit