Pythian Group

Among the features announced with the release of version 4.6 of the KDE Software Compilation is KateSQL, a SQL Query plugin for the Kate text editor providing the basic functionality of a SQL client. It leverages the Qt SQL module, allowing you to make a connection to most types of databases. Out of the box it includes support for MySQL and SQLite, and with this post I’ll show you how to get it to connect to Oracle databases as well.

Since I am an Ubuntu user (Note: you’ll need to be on 11.04 and either be running Kubuntu or have the ‘kate’ package installed) these instructions will be specific to that operating system, though they will likely also apply to other Debian-based distributions with minimal modification. However, if you are using an RPM-based distribution such as openSUSE or Fedora, you’ll need to adapt the instructions somewhat to make sure you have the necessary development packages installed.

The first thing we’ll need to do in order to get this to work is to obtain an Oracle client. This can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network and requires that you have a valid Oracle.com Single Sign-On account. For the purposes of this article we’re going to use the Linux x86 Oracle Instant Client and the files we’re going to download are:

oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.2.0.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient11.2-devel-11.2.0.2.0.i386.rpm


The first package is the client itself, providing the files required to run OCI applications. The second is the Instant Client SDK which includes header files for developing Oracle applications with Instant Client: in our case an OCI library for the Qt SQL module.

Users of RPM-based distributions can just go ahead and install these packages while others will need to convert them to .deb format first. The best way to do this that I am aware of is with the tool called Alien. Let’s install it, convert the Oracle Instant Client packages, and install them too.

cd /path/to/oracle/instant/client/files
sudo apt-get install alien
sudo alien oracle-instantclient11.2-basic-11.2.0.2.0.i386.rpm
sudo alien oracle-instantclient11.2-devel-11.2.0.2.0.i386.rpm
sudo dpkg -i oracle-instantclient11.2-basic_11.2.0.2.0-2_i386.deb oracle-instantclient11.2-devel_11.2.0.2.0-2_i386.deb

The next step is to install all of the dependencies necessary to build the Qt SQL OCI library.

sudo apt-get build-dep qt4-x11
sudo apt-get install qt4-qmake libqt4-dev libaio1

Then we will need the actual source code for the qt4-x11 package. This can be obtained with the following command:

apt-get source qt4-x11

To recap, at this point we’ve downloaded and installed the Oracle Instant Client and all of the dependencies required to build the qt4-x11 package, and we’ve downloaded the qt4-x11 source code. Next we’re going to build the Qt SQL OCI library itself.

sudo ln -s /path/to/qt4-x11-4.7.0/src /usr/include/src
sudo cp -r /path/to/qt4-x11-4.7.0/include/QtSql/private /usr/include/qt4/QtSql/
cd /usr/include/src/plugins/sqldrivers/oci/
qmake "INCLUDEPATH+=/usr/include/oracle/11.2/client64" "LIBS+=-L/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib -Wl,-rpath,/usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client64/lib -lclntsh -lnnz11" oci.pro
make
sudo make install

Now that the libqsqloci.so module has been built and installed, Kate should be able to connect to an Oracle database. Launch Kate (or close and re-open it if it was already running), click Settings -> Configure Kate, expand the Application tree if necessary, click Plugins, check ‘SQL Plugin‘ and click OK. Then click SQL -> Add connection to launch the connection wizard. In addition to the MySQL and SQLite database drivers, you should now also have drivers named QOCI and QOCI8 available. Choose the appropriate one, enter relevant connection details, and complete the connection wizard. You can now execute queries against the database and display result data.

Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. Though I have been contributing to Blogrotate since its inception, this is the first time I have had the honour of posting it myself. Go me!

Operating Systems

Red Hat has announced the availability of a public beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). There are a number of changes, for which Dave Courbanou at The VAR Guy does a pretty good job of providing an overview. Read the rest of this entry . . .

I use Mozilla Thunderbird at work for reading my email and, since Mozilla Messaging is approaching the release of Thunderbird 3, I decided to give the latest beta a try. I’m an Ubuntu user (8.04 “Hardy Heron” on my workstation) so I sought out a PPA for development versions of Thunderbird, and came across ubuntu-mozilla-daily. I added the repository to my apt config and you can too, here’s how:

Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list using your favourite editor. Read the rest of this entry . . .