Accessing Oracle8i Data on a FreeBSD System

[Martin Welk]

An Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 04:39:14PM -0600, Martin McCormick wrote:

(...)
> 	There is a linux distribution available on the Oracle web
> site called linux81701.tar, but it appears to be for those wishing to
> run an oracle8I server.
> 
> 	What we are trying to do is:
> Receive data from the oracle data base on the Pinnacle server, process
> the data, and be able to set or clear flags on data we send back to
> the Pinnacle server.
> 
> 	My question is what tools do I actually need under FreeBSD
> Unix to access the Pinnacle server's oracle8i data?
(...)

Well, I think the Oracle 8i distribution for Oracle includes an Oracle
client. I'm not sure if it is possible to install this stand-alone, but at
least you could give it a try.

I've never managed to run the Oracle Java installer on FreeBSD, but it's
possible to do an installation on a Linux box - than you could just put
together the Oracle installation directory and transfer it to your FreeBSD
box. You might want to try to install the client only on Linux and transfer
it to FreeBSD, and, of course, you need to run the Linux emulator and you
probably need a couple of the Linux shared libraries (/usr/ports/emulators/
linux-base) - as Oracle 8i for Linux runs on SuSE Linux 7.3 and RedHat 6.4
and similar, you might have to go with the older linux-base6.

Check of the environment of your Oracle user and make sure that your
ORACLE_HOME and LD_LIBRARY_PATH and your PATH is set correctly.
You can change the ${ORACLE_HOME}/client/network/admin/tnsnames.ora 
by hand without the Java dbassist or whatever, and if you've done
that all correctly, you might be able to connect to your database
with the sqlplus command.

If you want to use those Oracle client libraries from somewhere else,
you will need a Linux application loading the Oracle linux shared 
libraries.

Well, at all, this is something I'd call PITA and of course not supported
at all - so although I like FreeBSD very much (I'm using it for almost ten
years now at various places), I think that Linux might be the easier way to
go, unfortunately...

Regards,
	Martin

-- 
      ,,Oh, there's a lot of opportunities, if you're knowing to take them,
                  you know, there's a lot of opportunities, if there aren't
                    you can make them, make or break them!'' (Tennant/Lowe)