Installing TOra on Ubuntu
12/3/2008TOra's 2.0 release has gone well so far. That is to say it's been quiet. When it's quiet that means people are going about getting work done and generally not complaining. It's a good thing.
However, several people have been having trouble installing TOra with Oracle. Since it's proprietary we're not able to ship the Oracle client along with our binaries or add a package dependency like we do with the Open Source databases we support. Happily, installing Tora only requires a few simple steps.
Downloading
Firstly, you need to download and unpack the Oracle instant client . All of our builds have been compiled against the instant client. While they are generally compatible with the full Oracle installation (of the same version), there have been reports of crashes and odd errors. Even if you run a different version database, using the instant client works great. For example, I use the 10g instant client against an old 8i database daily. The client and server will agree on a protocol. TOra also has special support for using instant client connection strings. That means tnsnames.ora and setting ORACLE_HOME is not required.
Download the instant client version from Oracle that matches the version of the .deb package for your system. For example, tora_2.0.0-1-11g- intrepid_amd64.deb is built against 11g. For the -10g deb packages, make sure to grab the 10.2.0.4 zip. You only need the basic package for running TOra. Also, unless you need Oracle errors translated in another language, the basiclite package is much smaller.
Also download TOra while you're at it (of course!). Actually go ahead and download it a couple times. Help out the stats.
Lastly, I had to disable Debian's automatic dependencies to build TOra against proprietary software, and so I'd forgotten to add libqscintilla2-3 to the list. Please apt-get that, too.
Installing
Unpack the instant client folder wherever you like. Location doesn't matter on a single-user system. To install system-wide, make sure to unzip somewhere all users can access.
If you do have the full Oracle installation, then the following instructions
may conflict with your existing settings. You'd have two copies of the same or
nearly same libraries. In that case, removing all Oracle entries from
ld.so.conf and using LD_LIBRARY_CONFIG would probably make the most sense.
Simply add export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/full/install
to the Oracleuser's
.bashrc. Add the same for your user account with the instant client path for
TOra.
Otherwise, add the instant client folder to your /etc/ld.so.conf. The easiest way to do this is to create a new conf file in the /etc/ld.so.conf.d folder:
sudo bash
echo /path/to/instantclient > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/oracle
ldconfig
Double-click the .deb for TOra to install or run:
sudo gdebi tora_2.0.0-1-11g-intrepid_amd64.deb
Running
Before running make sure you don't have an ORACLE_HOME set. This may also
conflict with the instant client. Run unset ORACLE_HOME
to make sure you
don't have this environment variable. While the full Oracle still needs it,
the instant client doesn't require any more setup.
Run TOra and have a lot of fun!