Windows Instant Client Setup

On my systems, I always opt for the instant client so I can get going with SQL*Plus as quickly as possible - the full client is just beyond my needs. If you are a regular consumer of my posts, you may have noticed I'm not primarily a Windows user, but of late I've had a need to be using Windows. So this particular post will be guiding the set up of the instant client, setting up your tnsnames and getting SQL Developer to use the OCI/thick driver.

So first, head over to the download page for Instant Client: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/winx64soft-089540.html. I'm just grabbing the latest version as at the time of this article (12.2.0.1)

The packages I usually grab are:


  1. Instant Client Package - Basic Light
  2. Instant Client Package - SQL*Plus
  3. Instant Client Package - SDK


The basic and basic light packages make mention that one pre-requisite is the Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Redistributable. So go ahead and install that before hand if necessary.

From the three files downloaded, you should end up with 3 zip files. Now, you will want to extract the contents of each into the same folder - usually I end up with a single folder named instantclient_12_2 containing all the files.


Each zip file Oracle provides contains a single folder (instantclient_12_2), so if you apply the same path during extraction, all files will go to the same location. In my example, I end up with all my instant client files at the following path:

C:\Users\trent\Downloads\instantclient_12_2\instantclient_12_2\

So, I then cut the folder in the last segment of the path and put it in my C drive, such that I end up with C:\instantclient_12_2.

Now that we have all the files, we need to a couple of extra steps so we can start using SQL*Plus.

Our folder contains a binary for sqlplus, so we should add this path to our Path environment variable, so that we can type sqlplus within command prompt without needing to specify the full path. So open the Environment Variables configuration tool within Windows. On Windows 10, this is easily accessible by searching for it in the Start menu.



There are two options - User or System variables. Since I'm the only one using the system, I'll just opt for User variables. So focus on the Path line, click edit, and add the location where you stored your instant client files.


It's also not a bad idea to set an environment variable ORACLE_HOME to point to the same location.

With all that done, you should now be able to open up command prompt and type: sqlplus /nolog, to get an SQLPlus command prompt. If you have a database server you can connect to, try connecting too to make sure all is good.

Ok, the next part is how do we connect with our tnsnames entry?

I know my entry will look like this:

XE =
  (DESCRIPTION =
    (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = 192.168.56.101)(PORT = 1521))
    (CONNECT_DATA =
      (SERVER = DEDICATED)
      (SERVICE_NAME = XE)
    )
  )

So, option one is within ORACLE_HOME, make a folder in the path: $ORACLE_HOME\network\admin named tnsnames.ora with your TNS entry specifications (like above), and you don't need to do anything else - it will be automatically picked up. You can now connect to the server with the convenient shorthand of XE. E.g. sqlplus user@XE

If by chance you would prefer to keep it in another location, you just need an environment variable for TNS_ADMIN.

With the instant client now installed, I like to tell SQL Developer to use the instant client I have installed on my system, so navigate to Tools -- Preferences... -- Database -- Advanced, and set up the configuration based on where you store your instant client. 


Read more about the thick driver support within SQL Developer on Jeff Smith's blog: https://www.thatjeffsmith.com/archive/2014/01/oracle-sql-developer-4-and-the-oracle-client/

Popular posts from this blog

Report row buttons firing a dynamic action

Image
A lot of the time on reports of data, we'll define a link column, and specify an image which is the beloved pencil icon. Which is good and all, but looking in the Sample Database Application (packaged application), they have taken a different approach to style links - a button that stretches the width of it's containing cell. So, the UI ends up looking like so: So, is this done? Well first, you define a new column for the placeholder. Suppose I want my link column to be Report, I define an extra column in my query: , 'Report' report_link Then I need to go to my new column's attributes, and change the column type to a link. And, in the link attributes, set the text to what you want displayed. Here, I'm just going to display the value of the new column and point to my desired page. So I set the target page, then also the Link text as #REPORT_LINK#. At this point the report will just show link text, as we expect. So, then to replicate t
Read more

Accessing the last request value from a page submission

Image
When you submit the page, you will typically have page processes that run. For me, I use these request values to determine which processes are run. This is rather straight forward for on submit processes as you can just specify the condition request = Expression 1 Or, if you have multiple requests that link to this process, Request is Contained within Expression 1, and Expression 1 would be a comma delimited set of values. Request simply refers to the bind variable :REQUEST (or apex_application.g_request). If we try and do the same on a page rendering process, we no longer have access to this value - which makes sense. If you update the branch, to set the request portion of the URL, we will then be able to access the bind variable :REQUEST in all page rendering processing points. This has the obvious downside that if the user wants to reload the page,  clicks in the address bar and hits enter (or clicks refresh), the processes on that condition
Read more

Installing Oracle Instant Client on Ubuntu

Now that Oracle has enabled us to download instant client without any click through for accepting the license , I wanted to revisit a seamless install of the instant client on a new set up. Ubuntu has the documentation about installing the instant client here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Oracle%20Instant%20Client. First - because Oracle provides their releases in RPM archive format (or a tarball), in order to have an installer you need to create a DEB archive. There is a package in the archives, alien, which aids this process. This gives the start of the script: #!/bin/bash # Install dependencies sudo apt install alien The 3 packages the Ubuntu documentation tells us to retrieve are: - devel - basic (I opt for basiclite instead) - sqlplus So, over at the downloads page: https://www.oracle.com/database/technologies/instant-client/linux-x86-64-downloads.html we can grab the link. # Download files. Example specific to 19.3 # Some links were not correct on the do
Read more