Michael’s Blog

Ok, I’m brand new to Oracle with the goal of becoming an oracle DBA for more and more projects that are requiring Oracle.  We’ve also decided to migrate as much as possible to Oracle.  I’m fairly well versed in MySQL and PostgreSQL, but not Oracle yet.  I’m finding documentation leaves a lot to be desired, but there is good support on various forums across the Web.  Here, I’ll contribute the same.

Oracle Client for Windows - I’ve got to make an ODBC connection between an application and Oracle.  I’ve installed the Oracle Instant Client for Windows as well as the ODBC suppliment.  Basically, they lack any sort of documentation or installer.  Stick them in a directory such as c:\instantclient, then add this directory to your path in windows.   Inside this directory, create a tnsnames.ora file (yes, it is needed although they fail to mention it).  Also add to the enviroment variables a TNS_ADMIN and point it to this directory (not the tnsnames.ora file itself).   This got me to a successful test at least.

installation of Oracle Instant Client 10g for Linux and integration with PHP.  This wasn’t as bad as expected, provided we ended up using a spec file from freshrpms.net that rolled the oracle-provided client into an RPM.   We also had to create a php module…more to come.