Pythian Group

Good afternoon sports fans. I’ve had a couple of requests to update my world famous blog on installing TOra. Frankly I have been wanting to get this out for a while but duties other than blogging have taken precedence. That and I think my blogging ran out of entropy and needed some other IO to get going again. Well it’s now time for you all to let out that breath you have been holding since the ‘perfect 10′ was released (on 10.10.10 no less).
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Once again into the breach. The release of Ubuntu 10.04 is at hand. I’ve been playing with “Lucid” for a couple of months now but since we’re in beta2 with the release candidate soon to follow, I thought I would really sit down and get my normal app stack working including TOra. All in all the instructions are mostly the same as last time around, with a couple of new improvements, caveats and quid pro quo.
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Good morning folks and welcome to chapter 3 in the ongoing saga of TOra and Oracle support for Ubuntu. In this edition we’re faced with a new Ubuntu, new TOra 2.0, and new and exciting adventures, all of which I have stripped out so you can get this up and running quickly.

All in all, the build process turned out to be simpler than it had on previous versions all thanks to a much smarter build system. The scripts that debian-ize the packages are much more robust and also much more complex at first glance. There was no configure line to change in this one, it’s smart enough to pick up all the elements you need provided they are where the build expects them to be. One such item is the Oracle include path, which I will say more about shortly. Enough snappy patter, let’s get on with . . . 

Installing TOra with Oracle support on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

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Considering my recent update to Ubuntu 9.10, I decided to have another go at getting TOra up and running. This time I am tackling a 64-bit system rather than the 32-bit “Hardy Heron” I had done previously.

On my way, I found some odd issues that I will describe here. All in all, it was a good few hours of cobbling together the pieces I needed to proudly present to you . . .

Installing TOra with Oracle support on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

Conventions and Caveats

• I use sudo for everything because logging in to root shells is just bad practice.
• I plug vi whenever possible, because vi is the greatest (and to annoy emacs people).
• I did this all in a KDE desktop, which means that some things I say may sound like I use KDE. Commands issued are in pre-formatted text without any prompt gunk in front of them, so cut and paste to your heart’s content.
• Output is also in pre-formatted text and I use it sparingly where relevant. Apt likes to output lots of text. I think it’s lonely.
• Some instructions are pasted from the original so you will not need to refer to my last howto to get this working. For an all-new jocular experience, no attempts at humour were recycled.
• When I say “dep”, I actually mean dependancy.

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The situation is this. I am a system administrator working in a world of DBAs. This is not a bad thing, but sometimes tasks crossover and I need to connect to Oracle. In light of this, I have been using the Oracle SQL Developer GUI in KDE for some time now.

While the functionality of the product is quite slick I find it painful to work with. The major source of my pain is the slow interface due to its dependence on Java. I mean seriously, the screen refreshes are abysmal. I found that the more I used it, the more I needed a lighter, faster alternative.

One day a while back, I noticed that the boss was running TOra. He’s more of a DBA than I am, and I tend to trust his opinion on such things, so I asked him about it. He told me it was quite good, and so I decided I should try it out. I installed it on my Kubuntu desktop, fired it up, and much to my chagrin, found that it had no Oracle support. A bit of digging turned up that Oracle support was not included in the Debian package.

I had to do something about it. A bit more research brought me to some useful sites, a couple of which I will reference later, but after going through the process, I found that none of them had all the bits together in one nifty package. This is an attempt to change that.

After bouncing back and forth on some of these steps, fixing environment issues, decoding compiler errors, and generally fiddling, I went back to my notes and terminal histories and figured out what I feel is the best order for the process. This is the streamlined version of maybe two hours of fiddling. I hope it will help someone avoid the pitfalls (there are 8-bit crocodiles below!).

And so I humbly present to you . . . 

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