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Lets be blunt about it. The Oracle client can be a real pain to get working sometimes. Following are some basic steps that I used to get a properly working Oracle client installation on Ubuntu 9.10.

Helpful Links

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B12037_01/java.101/b10979/instclient.htm#sthref1813

Getting the files

The Oracle Instant Client main page is here. You will need to register (free account) with Oracle to access their free downloads. After you’ve registered, you can grab the following files from Oracle (10.2.0.4 is the current version as of the writing of this article). You may not need all of these, but I wanted to make sure that I had a complete installation of the client software.
oracle-instantclient-basic-10.2.0.4-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient-sqlplus-10.2.0.4-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient-devel-10.2.0.4-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient-jdbc-10.2.0.4-1.i386.rpm
oracle-instantclient-odbc-10.2.0.4-1.i386.rpm

Lets debianize the rpm’s

$ apt-get install alien rpm
$ sudo alien oracle-instantclient-basic-10.2.0.4-1.i386.rpm
$ sudo alien oracle-instantclient-devel-10.2.0.4-1.i386.rpm
$ sudo alien oracle-instantclient-sqlplus-10.2.0.4-1.i386.rpm
$ sudo alien oracle-instantclient-jdbc-10.2.0.4-1.i386.rpm
$ sudo alien oracle-instantclient-odbc-10.2.0.4-1.i386.rpm

Unfortunately the oracle-instantclient-basic rpm has a deprecated libstdc++.so.5 dependency, see this link for an excellent explanation of the issue and a solution.

To fix this issue, we need to additionally download the following file (32bit version, other versions are listed here):
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/oci/occi/downloads/occi_gcc343_102030.tar.gz

Repackaging the Instant Client Basic package

NOTE: if you are in a hurry, you can skip all of these repackaging steps and just install the deb’s as-is. Once they are installed, then copy the contents of the occi_gcc343_102030.tar.gz file to the $ORACLE_HOME/client/lib directory

Unpack the oracle-instantclient-basic package to a temporary directory to correct the libocci dependency

Extract the package data files

$ dpkg-deb -x oracle-instantclient-basic_10.2.0.4-2_i386.deb \
    tmp/oracle-instantclient-basic_10.2.0.4-2_i386

Extract the package control files

$ dpkg-deb -e oracle-instantclient-basic_10.2.0.4-2_i386.deb \
    tmp/oracle-instantclient-basic_10.2.0.4-2_i386/DEBIAN

Extract the new OCCI library and overwrite the deprecated files extracted from the package

$ tar -zxvf occi_gcc343_102030.tar.gz
$ mv libocci.so.10.1 libocci10.a \
    tmp/oracle-instantclient-basic_10.2.0.4-2_i386/usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.4/client/lib/

Update the debian control files (Only really need to change the md5sums file)

$ cd tmp/oracle-instantclient-basic_10.2.0.4-2_i386
$ find usr/ -type f | xargs md5sum > DEBIAN/md5sums

Remove the old package in main directory, change ownership of package files to root and rebuild the debian package file

$ rm oracle-instantclient-basic_10.2.0.4-2_i386.deb
$ sudo chown -R root:root tmp/oracle-instantclient-basic_10.2.0.4-2_i386
$ dpkg-deb -b tmp/oracle-instantclient-basic_10.2.0.4-2_i386/ \
    oracle-instantclient-basic_10.2.0.4-2_i386.deb

Installing and Configuring

Now we can finally install the packages!

$ sudo dpkg -i oracle-instantclient-*

At this point you’ll probably want to set up some additional configuration details.

Set ORACLE_HOME in your .bashrc, or on the command line, following are all the variables I set

export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/10.2.0.4/client
export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/lib
export TNS_ADMIN=$ORACLE_HOME/network/admin

If you have a tnsnames.ora file (make sure the filename is all lowercase), you can install it as well
```
$ sudo mkdir -p $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin
$ sudo cp tnsnames.ora $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin
```

You can now test your Oracle client installation by connecting to a database with sqlplus (By the way, putting the password in the command line is not recommended as it can easily be pulled out of your history file by other nosy users if your permissions are too lax).

$ sqlplus 'username/password@SID'

If for some reason you have some trouble connecting, you can create a sqlnet.ora file under $ORACLE_HOME with some tracing options.

$ sudo vi $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin/sqlnet.ora

TRACE_DIRECTORY_CLIENT=/tmp
TRACE_LEVEL_CLIENT=SUPPORT

The next time the Oracle Instant Client is used, it will create a detailed log file under /tmp like the following: cli_1968.trc. Make sure to turn this option off when you are done as the logfile can get quite large!

That’s about it, any questions or suggestions, please post them!

I have seen some very well written blogs out on the interwebs which include clean and well highlighted example code inline with the rest of the document. Turns out it is really easy to implement in WordPress. I browsed around and found a nice comparison of different syntax highlighting tools and settled on the Google Syntax Highlighter. Here is the comparison review.

Getting the Code

You can get the latest version as a WordPress plugin either by searching for “Syntax Highlighter” in the plugins admin page for WordPress, or you can download from the WordPress site.

Usage

Just surround your code like this:

<pre class="brush:[code-alias]"> â€¦Your Code Here </pre>

replace the "[code-alias]" segment with the type of code you have. See all the available brush aliases at the plugin author's website. For Example, PHP would be like this:

<pre class="brush:php"> â€¦Your PHP Code Here </pre>

Examples

SQL

SELECT count(1)
FROM some_table
WHERE some_field = 'some value';

#include 

main()
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

Python

#!/usr/bin/python

print 'Hello World!'

An Engineering Masterpiece, Really!

Installing and Configuring Oracle Instant Client 10.2.0.4 on Ubuntu 9.10